Rote learning

Rote learning: many people question the way kids are taught in primary schools in India which is mainly thru rote learning. Ability to remember a lot of stuff is given more importance over original thinking and creativity. Given that we can “google” for information any time, what is the need for rote learning, many will ask nowadays. I feel it is still required.

Let me tell you an analogy of a computer.  Imagine a computer that has 1 TB hard disk and 2 GB memory. If you try to play a memory intensive graphics game on this computer it may crash frequently because the graphics program requires the data from the program be available “in-memory or RAM” for it to work properly and It will find that 2 GB is not enough. All the information that is required to play the game is available on the hard disk; yet, the program needs it to be in RAM for effective playing experience.

If you want to increase the performance of the computer in above example, we will need to add more RAM to it. We can simply upgrade the memory by purchasing suitable RAM.

Coming back to humans, you can think of “Google” as the hard drive and “RAM” as the brain/memory that is required to process the information and synthesize it into new ideas! Unless we have large enough memory we will not be able to make sense of what we are reading and also gain new perspectives! We need good memory to be able to do that.

How do we get good memory? We won’t be able to upgrade our memory like we can upgrade a computer! We need to train it from a very young age to hold and retrieve a lot of information on the finger tips; whether you do it thru rote learning, associative learning or active learning it’s all up to you!

So in my opinion, rote learning/having good memory is very important in the formative years to be able to become a free, independent thinker when the child grows up to become an adult.