@Cneil: I agree largely that some subjects still lend themselves to memorisation and familiarity. I don’t particularly agree than grammar is one of them though. I only started really learning about the proper “terms” of tenses and verbs, adverbs, nouns etc late on in school, but I knew how to use them intuitively from reading, writing and hours of grilling from my mom. Does that mean I didn’t “learn” how to use grammar? Or perhaps I learned it better because it wasn’t drilled into me in a formalised manner?

Certainly I’m not in favour of students going for say, a debate without memorising facts to back them up, and it would be useless for a History student to finish school without memorising dates. But how many of us need to memorise the index/match function on Excel, when all we need to do is understand which parameters are important for the function, bookmark a help page to jog our memory, and refer to it when we need to?

Sure there are always maps available, but at the pre-tertiary level kids still need to memorize where countries are located in order for their minds to make meaningful connections. A professional programmer just wouldn’t be efficient if he or she had to constantly flip through a book every second he or she sat down to work. Perhaps the process of learning Pascal in college gives programmers the appropriate mental tools to work with future programming languages. In the same manner, you’ll never master mechanics if you haven’t memorized the coordinating and most of the subordinating conjunctions.

The challenge that the abundant availability of information gives to teachers and students is in assessment. It is no longer useful to grade solely over rote memorization. (I’m not sure it ever was.)

The challenge comes in creating assignments that can be objectively assessed that require students to use the material that they are supposed to learn.

If you made an A in the class just because you could create an accounting sheet, then that was a useless exercise. If you got an A in a class because you could balance a hypothetical account with the accounting sheet, then that is an acceptable educational practice.

As for this subject, I’ve been thinking it for quite some time, inspired by a very similar first-year experience.

We have all the information we need at our fingertips. We have applications and scripts and logarithms that do things (like balance sheets) for us. (We just have to check them over, so we do need to understand them in an applied sense.) And whether we like to admit it or not, we all have a reasonable expectation that we will continue to have access to them for the rest of our careers. Granted that, we need to stop wasting our time with memorization and start learning how to take information (whether its numbers, opinions, or widgets), “convert it,” and make good decisions with it. This world isn’t going backward (well we’ll see what the economy does; probably not much.)

When the cavemen figured out fire did they sit around and practice lighting them (okay, maybe for a bit), or did they go out and see what they could use it for?

It’s great to see people questioning it.

As for whether educators are ready to face it – well, I think that will come in time. And it goes beyond just educators – are the parents ready to accept it? It goes deep into society’s culture, and that’s something thats’ going to be hard to change. Doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try, though, right?

you don’t know what you need, or don’t need. till maybe sometime later..