Rote learning — memorizing things through repetition — is the most dominant strategy adopted by mainstream education. It is also very common in our life: if we forget something, we instinctively read it again. These are some activities that fall into the category of rote learning:
- Reading something over and over
- Copying
- Unvarying practice
These activities sum up the ways we learn since we begin learning. Put simply, rote learning is mechanical repetition; the idea is that if you do something a lot of times, you will learn it. Nothing sounds wrong in the theory, but it is not the case in reality.
It is not that repetition is unimportant — it is, but pointless, mechanical repetition is. In rote learning, the learner keeps doing something over and over and expects (or prays for) improvement, but the result is usually not satisfactory —there is something wrong with this approach.
Very few people would find rote learning to be enjoyable: copying a paragraph feels about the same as watching paint dry. This is a problem: rote learning demolishes interest and motivation. The tedium of rote learning remove fuels from the learners’ tank, and the low effectiveness of rote learning(which many of us have experienced) can make the learner feels anxious, helpless, and wants to relinquish.
Tedious experience combined with the low effectiveness, rote learning is an unattractive activity that our brain loathes. The learner’s brain will keep seeking to wander on escape. It is usually not the learner who has focusing issues, it’s just that the task is too tedious. In this situation, it is strenuous to even begin learning.
Many people have a belief of ‘no pain, no gain’, and insist that rote learning should remain. But the problem with rote learning is that the gain doesn’t come together with the pain. You can’t get better by pointless repetition.
Remember what rote learning is? Mechanical repetition — not understanding. This is another serious problem: volume mechanical repetition makes you remember specific patterns, but they are patterns that you don’t know what to do with because you don’t understand them.
Rote learning helps to remember the perceptual experience, usually the appearance and sound of sentences, or the experience of executing a method. The ‘meaning’ and ‘understanding’ part is completely left behind, and without understanding, the pattern memorized is pretty much useless.
You can be a sentence rewriting specialist and can’t write a fluent paragraph.
You can remember all formulae and can’t solve a simple equation.
You can know all words and grammar rules of a language and struggle to say something in it.
You can be a case-studies expert and an atrocious adviser.
I guess you are not an advanced computer that learns by processing billions of patterns, so you probably need to understand them before thinking about the application part. Having tools is not enough, you also need to know how to use them.
If you acquire a pattern through rote learning, you will only be capable of executing the pattern, nothing more. Varying, unfamiliar, complex patterns like unusual equations or real-world problems, will give you a huge problem.
Rote learning is just adequate for standardized tests where the number of patterns is very limited compared to reality. So If you don’t mind the toil, you can attain remarkable scores in exams while understanding nothing.
However, there are countless patterns in the real world — so many that it is impossible to memorize them by mechanical repetition one by one. It is unrealistic to remember the solution to every possible problem you may encounter in the future. In reality, we can’t memorize everything, but we can derive a solution or design actions by thinking about and extending what we know. Both of these are not what rote learning concerns.
Memorizing patterns arbitrarily will only make one able to recall the memory and reproduce some words or some specific actions. This has very limited usefulness in reality.
Even when the goal is sole memorization, rote learning is still inferior — humans can’t remember well things they can’t understand.
Humans have two kinds of memory, one for perceptual experience(episodic memory) and another for meaning(semantic memory). One important point is that semantic memory is significantly stronger than episodic memory.
Sometimes we forget how the food of a restaurant tastes, but we can usually remember whether it tastes good. The episodic memory for the taste has faded away, but we still know if the food was delicious because the concept of ‘tasty food’ has remained. We may not remember the scenes in the past exactly, but we usually can recall ‘concepts’ in the scene.
The episodic memory has dissipated, but the semantic memory — the stronger one, the one for meaning, has not.
The strength of semantic memory can be used to our advantage. Wonder how some people can remember a long string of random numbers? The answer is meaning: the number themselves are meaningless, but they can be made meaningful: mnemonists use techniques to convert numbers into meaningful story-like mental images that can be converted back to numbers. No mnemonist like rote memorization — it doesn’t make a slight sense.
Human brains are simply not designed to learn things pointless to us. We are not cameras, we rely on meaning and concepts to remember things.
The two strings of words below have the same components, but are they equally easy to memorize?
- He carelessly drops a pen on the floor.
- On a the drops carelessly pen floor he.
The first one takes no effort to remember, but it’s clearly not the case for the second one, which is just a random string of words. The two sentences take up equal storage space for a computer, but for humans, the meaningless one is far harder to memorize.
This may be an extreme example, but the second sentence is similar to what many students see, the sentences in a book are just random strings of words if they are not understood. Without adequate understanding, it is hard to remember anything.
Understanding does not just make you a bit smarter in a less tedious manner, it also gives you better memory, yet it is still overlooked.
With numerous downsides and limited usefulness, rote learning should be one of the last options to consider in learning. But why is rote learning so common despite all these downsides? And what would be its replacement? These are questions we will explore in the upcoming articles.
