Even bourgeois media has an obsession with memorization. What do Hollywood writers do when they want to quickly get across that a character is smart? They have him (usually a man) quote some old book/play word for word, often at length. Turns out memorizing things is a skill that almost anyone can learn and get good at. But it’s treated like some super power.
What actually is the focus on memorising for? Like even my English lit exams i had to memorise the quotes i was going to use for an essag question i didn’t know yet.
How does this serve capitalism?
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systems don’t have to be good they have to be good enough
our education system basically produces as many people as we need taught to the standard we need. It isn’t better because it doesn’t have to be and institutions have inertia
to grind you down for a life time of "because i said so"s at work.
Related to liberal philosophy and psychology, I think, the whole “rational actors” perspective of the human being. That we are machines that take some input and spit out an output in reliable and accurate ways. The ones who don’t are ignored as part of humanity to maintain the definition.
Another way to look at education is that it is a factory line to output workers to exploit for labor. The defects are discarded, and the ones who make it out are the ones who somehow take any input and reliably accurate and exploitable output (labor)
Which is why graduates of most fields have no experience and function on cultivated instincts like memorization. Only when a worker works with their actual hands, so to speak, do they learn real knowledge of their labor. This is how education used to be, an apprenticeship sort of model, which you still see in certain trades and fields like the medical field.
As I understand it we imported it from China because it was a system that allowed education at greater scale than Europes previous system of having a conversation with the examiner. It lets lots of people sit the same exam at once
to say capitalism strives for greater efficiency is false it strives for greater scale
Now we stick with it because we’ve been doing it 200 years and people are used to it
Memorization predates capitalism. So I’d look for reasons in pre-capital societies
Well they probably didn’t have access to books and the internet. Nowdays it really seems like school is just supposed to churn out workers. At poor schools kids are taught to knuckle down and eat shit, at elite schools kids are taught that life is a game where you work out which rules to follow and which to bend.
The Prussian model of memorization and taking notes worked back when it was a small number of students learning from experts in niche areas. Now that we have printing presses and you are not expected to reference your college notes in your professional career the model has outlived it’s usefulness
the maoist uprising against the landlords was the largest and most comprehensive proletarian revolution in history, and led to almost totally-equal redistribution of land among the peasantry
Looking forward to the Communist utopia where doctor has to look up the difference between glucagon and glycogen
This but unironically, double checking prevents errors and you make more mental connections when you look things up.
That’s it. I don’t intentionally memorise anything. Never could. I realised that path was not for me as a six-year old with a key part in the Nativity who remembered some of their lines but none in the right order. When it comes to my work, though, I’m like an encyclopaedia because I meaningfully engage with the same content so often that it sticks. (At least, I think that’s what you’re saying, minus the Nativity part.)
Death to strict proctoring
Long live the online open-book take-home exam
I’m pretty sure academia doesn’t run on “my source is that I memorized it from somewhere” or “this research was conducted entirely on my own with no help from anyone at any juncture” anyway. Some memorization of basic things is cool and good (hot take: using a calculator to look up 5+8 is a waste) but extensive rote memorization (plus the whole cram mentality) is also a waste.
hot take: using a calculator to look up 5+8 is a waste
Unless you’re really drunk, then it’s ok
idk, I think a lot of anti-communist padding in popular non-fiction comes from ‘I’m sure I heard this somewhere’.
my physics profs hated memorization, and gave us extensive formula sheets for exams, plus let us bring a sheet with whatever we wanted on it
I had some professors that only implemented limits on cheat sheets because they noticed an adverse effect when students would bring more than they could reasonably use for a test and run out of time.
The act of making a good cheat sheet also has the effect of not needing that cheat sheet much, its like tricking students into studying things for understanding rather than forcing memorization.
A lot of traditionally “good” students will complain about open book exams though, since the questions generally tend to require you to go beyond the rote text book ones.
For instance, in 1st year phys the final tutorial question was open book, gave you an extra possible 5% above 100% and was simply “calculate the total power output per year of Wolf 359.” A full third of the class complained it was an unfair question.
When telling us that we’d have to memorise portions of the periodic table for exams in uni, my professor also pointed out that there is not a single chemistry lab in the world that doesn’t have a periodic table somewhere on the wall and testing us this way was a waste of time.
It’s like 120 elements, who has the space to keep track of them all, especially the obscure ones?
Hydrogen and a bunch of other bullshit
Astronomers be like
Metals etc
Something something oxygen nitrogen carbon
Memorising the first 20 really does speed up organic chem though.
Honestly good. Students learn to just memorize what they need for the test and no further, then dump most of that afterwards. “memorizing” and retaining are different things
If modern China’s not bourgeois then explain this Dengists
Is this really a thing is China? Holy shit, I knew our education sucked but I wasn’t aware how much better it was elsewhere (probably because of said education system failing me)
This is a very Mao thing, he hated people being too obsessed with reading and quoting rather than understanding and exploring. I don’t think it’s especially representative of modern China though, which has moved back towards the bourgeois memorization fetishism
Nowadays, no. GaoKao is basically all memorizing except for essays part of the exam. Even then, you have memorization to do to for the essays (structure, arguement, etc.)
