[ozim]

Yes teaching how to learn is the way for schools, but it is hard to explain to kids and lots of adults.

Just a nitpick that school enforcing memorizing particular list of facts or memorizing poems - is indeed teaching people how to learn, because how else will you explain to a child or an adult "hey you know if you read this thing 10 times and then try to repeat it another 20 times from memory - guess what !!! that is one trick to learn to memorize something."

But if they spend time on finding out how to memorize hand picked for them stuff and how to perform on exams on limited and picked topics - that sounds like they will be able to learn anything but still too many don't realize what the real lesson there is.

[danenania]

If the goal is learning how to memorize, I think it would be better to have specific courses or lessons on memorization rather than making all the subjects needlessly boring and stressful just for the sake of learning memorization techniques.

Knowing how to memorize is occasionally useful depending on one’s profession, but I don’t think it deserves such a heavy emphasis. People naturally remember what is interesting and useful to them. Force-feeding facts or dates or speeches or poems into memory is not fun and has very little educational value. That time and energy would be much better spent on projects that use and integrate the knowledge.