Back to Basics
It occurred to me that there is a lot of pretense surrounding how even basic learning works.
Being old, when we went to school, rote memory comprised the bulk of our “learning”. When there were detours away from rote learning, teachers simply tended to leave out bits of detail in order to help the students “think.” Instead of thinking, this tended to leave the lessons vague and required the students to spend much more time learning the same rote things. Still, we worked things out, managed to get a half-decent basic education and moved on to being The Learning Guys. 
Of course, there are the fanatical opponents to rote memory. They argue that rote memory is useless, and it is all about the synthesis of information. An recent example of this is the few decades of “whole language” education in our school systems. This approach is pushed by “holism” ideologues who deemphasized anything that wasn’t seen as contributing directly to developing meaning, such as phonetics, spelling, grammar, etc.
To me, this approach obviously didn’t work as we are left with a couple generations of kids that can barely read/write their way out of a wet paper bag, let alone enter university with the ability to express their thoughts or collaborate in the global academic community.
It seems obvious, but it is impossible to create meaning out of nothing. Shocking statement, I know… There has to be some foundation from which to base higher forms of learning. The teacher’s mission here is to differentiate the base knowledge for each area being taught and not be afraid to help the student with the rote memory task. This rote memory understanding of the material forms the basis on which the more rewarding analysis and synthesis tasks can be built.
When teaching a body of knowledge, select the material that lends itself to analysis and then admit the rest of the material is rote memory and teach it as such. There is no shame in this, and your students will thank you!
June 14th, 2007 at 2:30
Hey Guys,
In terms of this discussion ultimately everything revolves around how you define “rote memorization.” If you define it to mean “unconnected facts, unrelated to anything else” it is kind of hard to argue in favor of this kind of learning. If you define it to mean “any kind of discrete facts” than it is very hard to argue against because we connect knowledge using facts and experience as our anchors.
I’ve found, in discussions over at Chinese pod that people are all over the map when they use this word and that as such it has little useful place in discussions on learning. The term is, in the end, no more than a red flag.