[graemep]

Yes, you definitely need to absorb some information, but you also need to understand an process it.

There is a bias in education to memorising facts over teaching concepts and skills. It has certainly got worse in the UK over the last few decades as a result of pressure on schools to get high grades, which has lead to teaching the exam rather than the subject.

I might be biased by the small sample closest to me: my kids doing some of the same A level subjects, and the GCSE teaching my kids friends got compared with their learning (they were out of school from late primary until after GCSEs) .There is a lot of "you do not need to know it for the exam". Memorising standard answers and definitions. Learning how to do a calculation without understanding it. Discouraging extra reading as a distraction from the exams.

I am not claiming its a new problem, but its an ever-present one that is getting worse at the moment. its the exact opposite of what you need in a world where facts are accessible and explanations are often misleading.

[Retric]

It’s not a bias on the educational side, it’s the inherent requirement for knowledge before you can learn skills. Memorization creates a Rosetta Stone the enables people to start reading. You need to know what happened historically before you can have meaningful opinions about it. You need to memorize mathematical symbols meaning before you can use them etc etc.

The only bias here is people disliking memorization. It takes effort and has concrete right and wrong answers so you can fail in a way that doesn’t happen with skills. But disliking something doesn’t mean it’s actually wrong.

[KiranRao0]

I agree that memorization is a very useful skill, but I believe it’s over-used in some education systems.

There have been classes I’ve taken where ~half of the evaluation is brute memorizing dates/event names. Ive also taken classes (machine design) where the majority of the evaluation is open book and about solving problems. Most classes land somewhere in the middle.

I think there is a bias towards memorization-based testing because it’s easy. Coming up with trivia questions is easy. Grading those answers is easy. A students can’t complain about marks when they get a date wrong.

Coming up with problem solving questions is hard. Grading them is ambiguous. Students will complain that their mark should be higher. Everything is harder.

If the testing is memorization based, students will get good at memorizing facts and spitting them out on the test. If the test is problems solving, students will optimize for that.

[WalterBright]

> Learning how to do a calculation without understanding it.

I was able to do the math to solve quantum mechanics problems. But I didn't understand QM.