Andrew CohenTable of Contents
Does memorization still matter?
I have a friend who recently suffered a horrendous accident. She was hit by a bus and suffered a massive concussion. She got off pretty lightly, you might think, except that her concussion has kicked off a debilitating medical condition called Functional Neurological Disorder, including violent muscle spasms in her face and neck.
Upon hearing the diagnosis she received in the hospital ER, she went to see a neurologist, who furrowed her brow and said: “I’ve never heard of Functional Neurological Disorder … but I’ll look it up.”
I’ll look it up.
Imagine hearing that.
This is not what we expect to hear from a doctor, never mind a neurologist. Yet, so many top education policy blowhards are adamant that we should ignore knowledge acquisition in favor of pure skill development since “all the information we’ll ever need is available on Google”.
The medical case I mentioned is an outlier. Functional Neurological Disorder isn’t well understood in the medical community because its cause is largely unknown. But in most cases, doctors don’t need to consult their college textbooks or search the Internet to offer safe, effective care because the necessary knowledge they acquired in medical school is already deeply ingrained in their working memory.
So, yes, memorization matters.
Skill Building and Career Application
Doctors need to memorize many facts about human biology, diseases, symptoms, medications, contraindications, and side effects to provide safe, effective care. Architects need to memorize countless math, physics, and engineering principles to efficiently design structurally-sound buildings. Scientists need to memorize textbooks’ worth of chemistry concepts, laws, and formulae to safely and effectively innovate new medications and products.
Memorization matters. It’s what allows humankind to progress, excel, and provide high-quality care, services, products, and advice.
But it’s not the only component in knowledge acquisition. The practical use of that knowledge—skill building—is equally important.
Real learning is an interplay between knowledge acquisition drills and skill-building. A resident doctor will use a flashcard app like Brainscape to drill themselves on the symptoms associated with a suite of diseases. Then they’ll apply that knowledge to diagnose and treat real hospital patients.
Developing High-Level Thinking
Memorization is one key to building new knowledge and to fast, effective, high-level thinking. And it’s in tandem with the other key—the “doing” and the “boots-on-the-ground” decision-making—that knowledge becomes deeply encoded in our brains and muscle memory.
Trial lawyers memorize books’ worth of black-letter law and case studies in order to defend a client. But it’s in the courtroom, over the years, where they truly master the art of intellectual warfare with the opposition and persuasion of the judge and jury.
A lawyer’s education requires memorization and practice, as do doctors, architects, scientists, or other professions. After all, how can one acquire knowledge if one doesn’t remember it afterward? Yet, “memorization” has become a dirty word in education; maligned thanks to its association with boring drilling exercises and learning by rote, which implies trivial, surface-level learning.
Reframing Memorization
If, however, we reframe “memorization” as the suite of learning tactics — like spaced repetition — that takes knowledge and permanently encodes it in the brain, those unfavorable connotations fall away, as they should.
But does memorization STILL matter at a time when all that stands between us and the knowledge we need is an Internet search command? Why can’t a doctor type up your symptoms in WebMD and make a treatment decision based on the results, or that trial lawyer request a brief recess while they run a database search for relevant precedents?
Shouldn’t we rather focus on training students’ abilities to think critically and build skills rather than squander their time on the mentally rigorous exercise of ingraining knowledge when they can just Google it?
The answer is no. All high-level thinking is based on a foundation of knowledge, and a student cannot progress in their education if they don’t remember what they learned last week, last month, and last year. And while, with enough hands-on practice, that knowledge can become ingrained, it doesn’t come close to the remarkable efficiency of drill practice using spaced repetition.
How the Internet Has Changed the Role of Memorization
The Internet is a useful tool for finding information, but if you had to Google every single piece of information you needed to make a diagnosis or an argument in court or a single decision, human society as a whole would grind to a halt.
Remembering information as you progress allows you to scaffold new knowledge on a strong and stable bedrock of foundational knowledge. And with that knowledge foundation in place, you can make faster, safer, and more productive decisions.
Memorization matters. It’ll always matter, irrespective of the sophistication of the search tools at our disposal. We expect our experts to know their stuff; for it to be deeply ingrained in their brains. That’s why my friend balked when her neurologist said, “I’ll look it up”.
And it’s why you’d probably look for a new doctor if they whipped out their phone to Google your symptoms.
