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Comment by silverbax88 | Hacker News Reader

In many ways my scholastic experience mirrored yours, and it wasn't until years later that I learned our entire method of school education for k-12 is based on creating industrial factory workers.

Sit still, quietly do your work (which means memorization) and do your time (x hours per day for x days per week for x years), and you will get your degree, which would lead to a job working in a factory where you can do the same until retirement.

Our economy has changed, our culture has changed, and the schools are changing (I see that with my own daughter's experience), but for many people my age, we suffered through the change without support.

Now, the really big elephant in the room is the collegiate education system, which has become a system of paying exorbitant sums of money for a degree that will never pay for itself, for most students.

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  which means memorization

I wonder, why do people have problem with this. The trend seems to be a desire to learn without puttint any effort into that. I doubt that's possible at all.

I agree. Memorization of basic facts creates the foundation upon which more abstract concepts can be understood and developed.

This is entirely true, but i've found that schools also focus on rote memorization of useless or nonfoundational facts.

For example, in third grade my class had to memorize the multiplication table up to 12x12, but we didn't have to memorize that multiplication is really just a shorthand for repeated addition, so by eighth grade there were kids in my class that didn't understand why I wrote 6x5 instead of 5+5+5+5+5+5 in certain cases; they were also amazed that I managed to get the right answer even though i didn't do the problem the right way. We also had to memorize the squares of every number up to 20, but we didn't have to memorize the fact that squaring is a shorthand for multiplication of some number by itself, so some kids in my class could tell you that 15 squared was 225, but had to use paper and pencil to tell you what 15*15 was. And don't even get me started on kids who knew that 9x7=63, but had to use pencil, paper, and long division to tell you that 63%9=7.

Memorization comes from understanding, not the other way around. If you memorize the alphabet - congrats you can sing a song. If you understand the alphabet - you can write a book, singing the song is a side effect.

I think your example here undermines your point. There's not much understanding to be had of the (roman/english) alphabet. You memorize 26 characters as a foundation from which to build words. It's essentially an arbitrary set without underlying logic.

A better example to express your point would be multiplication tables. Why memorize a list of multiplicands and their products rather than learn what multiplication means so that you can generate them on the fly and only memorize as a by-product of common use?

Memorization to pass a test is just data that you will discard once the need for retention has passed.

In order to learn something usefully, and be able to retain that knowledge for years to come, you must have a fundamental understanding of the underlying principles.

I have to agree. However, I had two teachers in high school who I still have great appreciation for.

They were completely hands off. No lectures or anything of that sort. They only provided problems for the students to solve. If you needed help, they would point you to the nearest computer with internet access. Failing that, a shelf of books. Not only did you have to learn the subject matter, but you had to learn how to learn. I took away far more from their classes than I did in any other. If we want our students to become brilliant engineers and scientists, we need to reduce the "education" and increase the learning.

As an aside, I distinctly remember one of them stating that school would become unnecessary in the future. The internet would provide everything required to learn as you see fit. I honestly believe that time is here. If you teach the kids how to learn, they will.

I had some good teachers in the mix as well. My favorite was a dorky (sorry, but he was) Economics and Government teacher who did two awesome things:

1. Brought in a financial broker who taught us how to read the stock pages

2. Ran for a local political office so we could see how the process really worked. He would talk about his debate experiences, his polling numbers and his platform to us in a completely matter-of-fact way, and this fascinated me to the political process. Probably the best nugget was the reality, which he brought up, was that while he tried his best to be charismatic, he just wasn't, and his efforts to get noticed as a candidate were effectively shouting in the wind. He was resoundingly defeated in the elections, just another no-name candidate in a sea of people who most voters have never heard of, but our class learned more about politics in one school year than decades of watching CNN.

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