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Every high school english class I took covered this, save for British Literature. The problem is that grade school is inundated with busywork, memorization, and

Every high school english class I took covered this, save for British Literature. The problem is that grade school is inundated with busywork, memorization, and standardized test prep that no one but the top students cares about anything beyond their SAT score, if not just passing classes. Grade school needs to be rethought entirely. It's completely broken for the Information Age; no one needs to bother with memorizing minutia anymore, we need to focus on critical thinking.

ethbr0 5y ago
Personal hot take: memorization still serves both practical and brain developmental goals. Most kids nowadays can't even do basic single digit multiplication in their heads. Because they never memorized tables. How they're going to work through complex higher math problems efficiently, when every multiplication (and therefore every division) is a trip to the calculator, is beyond me. And furthermore, I can't believe all that memorization happened without changes in brain structure, especially at those ages. IMHO, we need to re-evaluate what we're having them memorize, and probably reduce the amount in favor of more critical thinking, but there's still a requirement for it. If nothing else, so that you're prepared for higher education, where one of the goals is to cram the fundamental information for your profession into imediate recall.
- jackson1442 5y ago
  Right, yes. There are certainly some things you need to know off the top of your head to facilitate learning. Generally the sets of data we explicitly have to memorize are fine- I’m more talking about exams where you’re tested over minutia rather than your understanding of the content as a whole. For example, I took a history exam where it asked “which of these books was not important to the civil rights movement?” listing three books explicitly mentioned in one sentence of the text and one that wasn’t. That’s the kind of memorization we need to get rid of- we need to be teaching people how to analyze concepts as a whole rather than simply being able to regurgitate the text.

ethbr0 5y ago

Personal hot take: memorization still serves both practical and brain developmental goals. Most kids nowadays can't even do basic single digit multiplication in their heads. Because they never memorized tables. How they're going to work through complex higher math problems efficiently, when every multiplication (and therefore every division) is a trip to the calculator, is beyond me. And furthermore, I can't believe all that memorization happened without changes in brain structure, especially at those ages. IMHO, we need to re-evaluate what we're having them memorize, and probably reduce the amount in favor of more critical thinking, but there's still a requirement for it. If nothing else, so that you're prepared for higher education, where one of the goals is to cram the fundamental information for your profession into imediate recall.

jackson1442 5y ago
Right, yes. There are certainly some things you need to know off the top of your head to facilitate learning. Generally the sets of data we explicitly have to memorize are fine- I’m more talking about exams where you’re tested over minutia rather than your understanding of the content as a whole. For example, I took a history exam where it asked “which of these books was not important to the civil rights movement?” listing three books explicitly mentioned in one sentence of the text and one that wasn’t. That’s the kind of memorization we need to get rid of- we need to be teaching people how to analyze concepts as a whole rather than simply being able to regurgitate the text.