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I. Allen's avatar

These are really compelling points. I will confess as a current college student, that I have very much undervalued memorization (as have the academic institutions more broadly, frankly) for that of critical thought. In fact, there are many tests that I will not study for, simply because I realize that I can quickly piece together the answer based on context clues in the question. However, it has lead to me getting towards the end of my degree and feeling that I frankly do not know much more than when I started. This is however, further complicated by the fact that fields like my degree, which are social sciences, have so much information constantly in flux, that it seems very difficult to "know" anything. It is generally more impressive to be a fast scourer of scientific journals than it is of knowing information on hand. Memory is certainly a dying virtue in the digitized academic sphere.

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Paul Fickes's avatar

This is a bitter pill to swallow. I've celebrated the fact that I've been able to allow my memory to rest because of the internet for years now. Even as a prescriber of medication, I find that while I have some things memorized, many I just look up on the spot with the patient in front of me. On one hand this is wonderful, but I hadn't considered the other side. I don't disagree with anything you said. I'll be thinking on this.

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