The Great Forgetting
The Great Forgetting
How 'critical thinking' and outsourcing of memory are withering culture, and how to turn the tide
…this discovery of yours will create forgetfulness in the learners' souls, because they will not use their memories; they will trust to the external written characters and not remember of themselves. The specific which you have discovered is an aid not to memory, but to reminiscence, and you give your disciples not truth, but only the semblance of truth; they will be hearers of many things and will have learned nothing; they will appear to be omniscient and will generally know nothing; they will be tiresome company, having the show of wisdom without the reality.
Socrates, The Phaedrus
Sitting next to the porcelain-tiled stove in my grandmother’s Swiss kitchen, I used to lay out a large array of memory game cards and challenge her to a round. She was 80, I was 8, so I would invariably win with a huge stack, proud of my apparently superior memory. Fast forward a couple of decades and you would see my own children taking joy in trying to beat me in the game (we have a wonderful memory set based on Monet’s impressionist paintings). Yet, memorization is no child’s play. According to Nicholas Carr, author of The Shallows-What the internet is doing to our brains, the increased outsourcing of memory threatens not only the depths and distinctiveness of the self, but of the culture we all share: ‘Outsource memory, and culture withers.’ Memory is fighting a battle on two fronts: the ‘critical thinking’ machine of the educational system, and the easy lure of a tech exo-brain at our fingertips.
In former times, students memorized poems, the presidents, Latin conjugations, and famous speeches such as the Gettysburg Address. It was a foundational method of learning, and while laborious and tedious for many, it was simply done. Until, that is, ‘progressive’ educators in the mid-twentieth century decided that memorization was just an outdated mechanical activity. They claimed it didn’t produce true knowledge, but was mere cud chewing.
Educators were trained to hold up Benjamin Bloom’s 1956 Taxonomy of Learning, which led to a canonical disdain of memorization in the classroom. Students were steered toward ‘higher order skills’ such as analyzing and synthesizing, rather than frittering time away with supposedly ‘lower order skills’ such as knowing and memorizing. But how do you analyze and solve problems without a solid base of knowledge?
In his article There is No Thinking without Memorizing, Jon Schaff draws an analogy to the architect encountered by Gulliver at the Grand Academy of Lagado: Attempting to build abstract thinking without a knowledge base is akin to attempting to build a house starting from roof tiles. There is literally no foundation. Even Swift himself, recognized that it is a thing of impossibility to ‘think for yourself’ when you don’t have much to think about.
For many years now, the most highly prized skill in educational circles has been ‘critical thinking’. It is viewed as the holy grail of learning and portrayed as the very antithesis of rote memorization. Teachers insist that they do not want students to memorize words and facts, claiming it might render kids into mere robots; instead they want them to think about words and facts critically, elevating them to the level of ‘independent thinkers’. This sounds reasonable enough, even laudable. But is it?
The more factual knowledge people have about a topic, the better they can think about it critically and analytically. In 1946, a groundbreaking study demonstrated that the reason expert chess players chose better moves than weaker players was not because they were better analytical thinkers. It was because they had a vast knowledge store of typical chess positions, acquired through memorization, that they could draw on. Committing knowledge to long-term memory is virtually unlimited. The more knowledge you have stored in long-term memory, the fewer items take up valuable space in working memory. This is why students who have trained their memories perform better on tasks that require analysis. Raemon Matthews, trainer for the U.S. Memory Championships, states that, ‘…education is the ability to retrieve information at will and analyze it. But you cannot have higher-level learning – you can’t analyze – without retrieving information.’ In other words, memorization is not antithetical to critical or analytical thinking, instead it forms the foundations for it.
In a recent First Things article titled Sweat the Small Stuff, Mark Bauerlein discusses the shift toward critical thinking and how it ushered in not just a modified pedagogy, but a dismantling of cultural tradition:
‘Critical thinking was sold to educators as a neutral inquisition; …[but has led to] a methodological change which had steered the meaning of the past in an ideological direction—a sweeping shift that began with the discrediting of memorization. Memorization, it turned out, was one of the foundations of a traditional formation of the young. Its loss opened the door to progressive lessons in Western and American guilt, in patriarchy and colonialism, in false heroes and white privilege…The more sophisticated theorists of change knew all along what critical thinking would do to the traditional contents of the curriculum. They didn’t need to declare open war on Western Civ (though some did anyway). The shift from memorization to critical thinking would do the job.’
‘Critical thinking’ has thus emerged as the pedagogical wolf in sheep’s clothing. Memorization is form of ‘adherence to the past’, a passing on of the torch of tradition. Critical thinking is a form of deconstruction, knocking out the foundational cornerstones that our cultural heritage rests on. Memorization upholds the ‘materials of yore’ by echoing their exact form. Students cannot simply alter the words of a Shakespeare sonnet or the Gettysburg address. Critical thinking, on the other hand, cuts these materials down, ‘poses incisive questions, pulls out buried assumptions, rethinks, and reexamines. The first operation maintains the past; the second claims superiority to it.’
Bauerlein points out that the loss of memorization is not only a separation from the ‘grand lineage of civilization’, but it is a particular loss to the teenage mind:
For when a sixteen-year-old learns Tennyson’s ‘Ulysses’ by heart, she labors in productive and healthy grooves. Her vocabulary grows: ‘hoard,’ ‘scudding,’ ‘unburnish’d,’ and ‘sceptre’ never pop up on her phone screen…We can add that the poem is a dramatic monologue, with Ulysses speaking in his own voice. That forces our sixteen-year-old to get inside the Greek’s head, to imagine his experience and longing, to figure his motives.
In an age where teenagers’ technology use is linked to a decline in empathy, memorization can be an incredibly valuable tool to get into a character’s mind. You cannot easily memorize lines spoken by a character without feeling with that character, indeed becoming that character. This identification allows the teenage mind to develop ‘cognitive empathy’, which is an act that does not require moral affirmation of the other person, but is instead ‘an act of imagination in which one recreates the mental life of another inside oneself, and it happens even when the teen abhors the character.’ Thus this form of memorization is a practice that is invaluable for teenagers, who are particularly prone to self-absorption.