Rote learning too has a place in education

Our faulty system of education encourages and rewards rote learning and regurgitation of the matter crammed and yet it has its own advantages, writes Kamala Balachandran .

Rote learning is learning or memorization by repetition, often without an understanding the reason involved in the material that is learned. Till about a couple of centuries ago, rote learning was the only way any learning was mastered. In fact all cultures routinely made their children ‘learn by-heart’, the various religious books. Far from understanding them, these scriptures were often written in a language that was entirely unfamiliar to the child! 

Progressive thinkers in the West, sought to move away from force-feeding book knowledge and focus instead on training the mind to understand concepts and think originally. While teaching methodology in the developed countries of the West have been modified based on this premise, in India, thanks to the many factors local to us, we still have a long way to go in that direction. There is thus wide gap, in our country, between education system as it is and as it should be. Schools still rely heavily on book learning and students can still earn their certificates with superficial understanding of the subjects. 

But since the educated class is familiar with the progressive ideas in the field of education, rote-learning is looked down upon. Phrases like ‘drill and kill’, ‘cram and damn’ have entered general vocabulary. Anyone who learnt lessons by-heart is now a considered a ‘mug-pot’ whose impressive academic achievement is no pointer to his/her superior IQ.   

Unfortunately, many children are so taken up this premise that they have developed a block, as it were, against committing any learning to memory. Here in this article, I wish to address this mental block, and tell students that rote learning still has a place in education and it is as much a skill to be mastered as problem solving.    

Entirely discarding rote learning is akin to throwing the baby with the bath water. Science, for instance, is an exact subject where one cannot use any arbitrary term while explaining a theory or describing an experiment. While small variations in sentence construction are permissible, the bulk of the matter must be reproduced by the student in the exact manner in which it is in the book. In Math, once again, students have to have in their ‘head’, the tables, formulae, theorems, rules etc. in order to build higher knowledge. Literature, History, Geography, too facts have to be retained and there is only limited scope for ‘original thinking’ here.

Indeed one must first have some basic understanding of the learning one aims to get by heart. The beauty of it is that memorization and greater understanding happen simultaneously! When the student reads and re-reads a lesson, new insights are gained. One sees things to which one was previously blind to.  Better grasp of the concepts, greater appreciation of language, happens only during the second third or fourth reading! By which time the matter has also been ‘copied’ to the brain!Students must understand that there is nothing derogatory about ‘Mugging up the lines’. Even the biggest of the screen and stage actors who are hero-worshipped, have to get their lines by-heart, before coming in front of the camera or audience. Does that mean that they are incapable of  original thinking? 

Contrary to what is believed, committing to memory is not an un-natural act. It is something we all have been doing automatically. That is the way we learnt to understand words and speak. That is the way we learnt to recite nursery rhymes and sing songs. 

Learning something by heart is not as hard as it is often made out to be. The trick is in being engaged with the task totally. Some students, who learn through their ears, have only to stay attentive in class to get the sequence of ideas in their head. Others get it when they read from print. For yet some the ‘fixing’ happens when they put it down in writing. Even when one is not consciously making the effort, the brain, especially of youngsters, has the capacity to retain and save all information that reaches it.   

So my advice to students is this. Do not think of memorization as anathema to good learning. Instead pick up memorization techniques that suit your style and file away the lessons in your brain. And remember that the brain can very effectively store all the learning and still have a whole lot of cells left for original thinking!