Memorization sure looks incredibly important to, say, mathematics, a topic in which practitioners often push back against memorization-based learning yet certainly appears to be pretty damn memorization-heavy. I know they're not deriving every theorem from first principles every time they apply it, nor starting from scratch every time they recognize a pattern that allows for a leap toward a solution, and discussion of mathematics sure appears to require having a huge mental mapping (memorized) of names of things to what they are and what they're used for, not to mention memorization of a large number of symbols.

On a more practical note, lots of memorized knowledge appears to be the primary thing the big tech companies want out of candidates, plus highish general intelligence (ability to quickly spot similarities between one problem and another so you can apply a memorized solution, chiefly).

I realized the importance of memorization in math during college calculus. In high school, exam integrations were easy, so long as you knew the material covered over the past few weeks. In college though, exam integration questions were brutal, unless you remembered all of the trig identities and formulae. Our textbook had a list of 180 or so equations that were required knowledge to complete the sample questions at the end of each chapter. I just had to memorize a lot of them, as the derivation was not something I was capable of doing.

Being able to quickly recall facts is really important for problem solving, even though we live in an era where you can search online for just about any fact known to humanity.

Bear in mind that memorizing trig identities was something you had to do for exams. If you want to get any use out of trig identities in "real life" you will need the kind of understanding that comes with being able to do the derivations yourself. In the time before computers there was a lot of value in being able to do the mechanistic kind of problem solving you're describing, but now that we have Mathematica, the only useful professional tasks that are left for humans to do involve the kind of knowledge it takes to do a derivation.

I had a professor that loved to make simple substitutions to values in questions, where the original question would be incredibly difficult, but if you spotted the substitution, the amount of work you had to do was dramatically reduced. Think something like integrate cos x + i sin x dx, if you spot that cos x + i sin x = e^(ix), and perform substitution, the problem becomes trivial.

Deriving information from facts is a vital skill. But recalling facts is also incredibly important as well. Having knowledge immediately available for use allows a person to apply that knowledge in real-time, which is important for problem solving and thinking on your feet.

Every college math class I took gave me a sheet with those kinds of identities on it. If I was doing the kind of work where I actually had to do calculus involving trig functions, you can bet I'd pull up a similar sheet while I was working. Sure having it memorized would be a bit faster, but that's true for far more things than I can actually memorize.

Problem is you need to remember the patterns first to be able to think "hey I know this pattern. Maybe if I look up what the identity is it will be usefull"

I think you might be confusing memorisation with intuition.

Memorization is valuable for learning music and speaking performances. You can't add style and flourish to something you don't know. I'd argue you can't reason about things effectively without knowing them "by heart," either.

I do partially agree with another commenter here on Foucalt's quote about universities and education being the tools of one class levered against another, insomuch as you can apply that power relationship to literally anything, not because it's rigorous or meaningful, but because it is sufficiently abstract. Similar to comments I've made here about how "graph based," solutions to certain problems are not new solutions, as anything you can express (encode) as objects and morphisms is going to have "graph," properties. Foucalt and other post-modern (Marcuse, Derrida, etc.) writers simply characterized that simple encoding in a moralistic power oppressor/victim narrative instead of a logical one.

The public curriculum is the bare minimum, and parents and family provide the enrichment to basic education. The outcomes are going to be unequally distributed, but at least a public curriculum raises the boats.

Your second paragraph has to be the single best account I've ever read of my own view. Kudos for nailing it so well yet so concisely.

(note: which isn't to say that it's easy to avoid perception- or value-induced biases, nor that it's possible (yet, or ever) to describe all of reality in strictly logical terms; as such philosophers may paint extremely subjective characterization of models that could otherwise be better generalized in more neutral terms.)

It's like if Einstein said "gravity is oppressing spacetime": assigning intent beyond mere behavior of large informal human groups ("the rich", "the 1%", "workers", "mothers", etc) is a slippery slope down hubris-bias road, de-elevating the science in favor of perception.

Like your display name suggest, Remembering people's name/face/"where you've first met" is one of those social abilities that can get you very far in life. So yeah, remembering is kinda something you should practice.

Disagree strongly here. Memorization is a workout for the brain. Being able to recall the exact words of, e.g. poetry or prose, admits them to reflection at any time, not just when notes are available. There is no substitute for knowing something without reference; it then becomes part of consciousness, not another book on the shelf that yeah, could be opened at some point, but in practice. Your brain is weaker and emptier when you opt out of actually committing things to memory.

I can see your point, although it's ironic that the final refuge of mechanistic behavior, after being cast out from math, would be poetry.

Memorizing is not useless at all. Here is a few examples:

In order to sing a song, you need to memorize it.

If you play poker, you can memorize useful probabilities, because you don't want to perform calculations all the time.

As a sys admin, you need to memorize commands and their syntax.

The list is endless.

> As a sys admin, you need to memorize commands and their syntax.

As a sysadmin, I just Google it (or DuckDuckGo it, nowadays). I also take notes; why should I memorize something if I can tell my computer to memorize it for me?

So much this. I like the metaphor of tree-trunk learning https://lifehacker.com/elon-musk-on-learning-new-things-view... — every bit of knowledge you can't connect to first principles or internalized second principles just falls down.

The mentioned memoization techniques are like synthetic trees for real leaves, but these tend to rot extremely quick.

Point in case:

I had two history teachers I can remember. One only because he was the most boring teacher I ever had and because of him I dreaded history forever. I can't recall a single thing about his class other than he talked about stone age people once. He made us remember lots of dates with weird mnemonics and I forgot every single one of them.

The other teacher was the best I ever had. She visualized the international politics leading from the age of industrialization in Europe to WW1 and WW2 so vividly in causalities, entities and relationships that I can recall the important development over 300 years of central European history any time. I don't have any year numbers for it, but it's one clear, coherent and logical story.

It's been 20 years since I sat in her class.

I agree with you -- we need to find better ways to teach deeper understanding rather than rote memorization.

at a minimum, it would've been nice to spend less time on brain-numbing repetitive tasks and test preparation.

there is value in memorization as a precursor to true understanding, you can't have understanding without association

examples:

- math: memorization of single digit addition/multiplication makes higher digit arithmetic easier, and comes in handy in higher-level math

- music: memorization of scales unlocks better ability to play & improvise songs (before deeper knowledge of how it relates to other notes/scales/modes, how this connects to dividing the frequencies of air waves, etc.)

>there is value in memorization as a precursor to true understanding, you can't have understanding without association

In math, there is something called the Moore method, where the professor sits back and has the students invent everything on the spot. The students are discouraged from reading books or even talking to each other outside of class. Apparently this works, and if so it's strong evidence that you can have understanding without any memorization at all, and even without teaching as it is commonly known.

Minor exception: Language. Memorization is extremely important in developing language- you're sure as hell not going to derive Chinese from academic linguistics first principles!

That's a major exception, actually, because it includes systematic naming in chemistry and so extends across more than one field. There are also all of the names and processes that you have to memorize to be a good biologist or microbiologist, and the large number of facts that organic chemists have to memorize. However, I hesitate to say that those things are pure memorization, because the connections between different facts that elevate them above memorization are usually only apparent to people who know a lot about the subject. For example, history to someone who knows very little is a bunch of dates and isolated factoids, but to someone who knows a lot about it, it's a continuing and cohesive narrative where everything reinforces and relates to everything else. Maybe the same is true if you know enough about biology, chemistry, or even language. I know there are a lot of connections between different languages, due to their shared evolution. Maybe, once you've learned dozens, all of the isolated coincidences start to fit together.

A few years ago I would have agreed with you, however not anymore. Memorization is an integral part of internalizing some concepts and subjects. Check out this thread from Michael Nielsen on the topic:

https://twitter.com/michael_nielsen/status/95776322945477427...