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Comment by dash2 | Hacker News Reader

This is the big question. The blog says "hey, we don't teach memorization, we teach critical thinking".

My response to that would be "for real critical thinking, you need memorization as a starting point. You can't think critically about the politics of the Middle East until you can point to Israel and Gaza on a map!"

Who's right? Are memorization and critical thinking complements, or substitutes?

This might have different answers in different fields. Like in maths, can you learn more advanced maths without a deep intuitive familiarity with numbers, the kind you get from being able to do arithmetic in your head? What about history? Can you get by without dates?

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> My response to that would be "for real critical thinking, you need memorization as a starting point. You can't think critically about the politics of the Middle East until you can point to Israel and Gaza on a map!"

Not true IMHO. You can map it to a some sort of neighbouring countries graph and a few other facts.

Not really, since the geography is quite important as to how the conflict evolved and where the conflict zones are.

You don't need to point at them from memory for critical thinking. You need to know how to find them and look up more details. Whether you could point them out from memory is irrelevant. (Just makes the process faster)

> (Just makes the process faster)

So the opposite of irrelevant. You need 10 minutes before you can start to think about the question that was likely a premise for a larger argument.

"To be a surgeon, knowing surgery techniques from memory is irrelevant. When called upon to do surgery, I can simply leave, attend medical school, then come back and do the surgery. What's really important is knowing where the medical school is located."

The ability of critical thinking in abstract is different than a combination knowledge/physical skill which requires practice and is time sensitive. Your example is of an entirely different class than the concept of "critical thinking".

The claim was "you need memorization as a starting point". And that's the part I disagree with. Ability - it's irrelevant. Speed of doing it in specific cases - relevant.

Yeah, I know a bunch more of my times table from memory today than I did when I was tested on it forty years ago. But I passed all those tests because of course all you need is know that multiplication is repeated addition and do the addition fast.

Today I can tell you that 7 x 7 = 49 but back then I'd have just gone 7, 14, 21, 28, 35, 42, 49 quickly and said "49" for the same answer but a slight delay.

Parents who were taught times tables and didn't do much later mathematics are often confused by the way we teach kids today, because they expect we'd try to cram the tables in there, but that's not actually useful, what's useful is seeing the pattern and we'd prefer a child who maybe doesn't know off by heart what 9x8 is but sees the pattern, and whose first question when the teacher finally explains exponentiation and shows how it relates to multiplication, is, "Does this keep going forever?" which yes, it does, there are more hyperoperations and they do keep going like this forever. That child understood the pattern, 9x8 is a problem a calculator can solve, understanding the pattern is something else.

Why do you need to memorize the map when you have a map? Filling in the US states on a map is busy work, but reasoning why the locations of the states relative to each other by looking at a map is important.

Dates are only important as they relate to each other, their specifics are almost always meaningless.

There's a difference between rote memorization and committing to memory through practice.

I mean, there is still some rote memorization needed at times, but you want to minimize it as much as possible.

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