My staff, a number with children, informed me yesterday that they do not teach cursive handwriting anymore and that even in the early grades they learn keyboarding (which rhymes with skateboarding and, of course, snowboarding.) Children when they have to “write” by hand use printing. Sounds like regression to me. I suspect they will next be knocking out cuneiform script on clay tablets.
Fashions in education vary from place to place, and from topic to topic, and move in waves besides. We in the UK have much to learn from US education, and much to teach in return ... much has been learnt and much failed to be learnt in each direction in the past. My personal opinion (not by any means universally shared) is that the UK is currently following the US on the long slide down the rear of a wave having failed to learn from US mistakes. (More on this, for anyone who wants to hear me on my hobbyhorse, here.)
But: I am happy to reassure Dr C that cursive writing is still taught in UK schools. On t'other hand, I also approve the teaching of keyboarding skills alongside handwriting. Both, in my view, are valuable skills - I would be sorry to see either displaced. Even a modest amount of cuneiform tablet baking might be a useful expansion of awareness in the range and scope of communication modes!
I am impressed that pedagogy spends little time teaching children facts anymore, at least as we were taught facts only 50 years ago, but I am not sure what is taught in its place.
I, too, believe that the thrust of education should be on process, not content. Some memorising will, probably, always be necessary - but only as a facilitating component of thinking. (see yesterday's post for a light hearted memorisation in education exercise)
For instance, do they even teach the times tables anymore with the advent of hand held calculators?
Again, in the UK they do teach multiplication tables (not to seem as if I think the UK does everything right: we do too much memorising now, and are sliding back towards a "memorise and test" culture, undoing much of the good which we discovered and developed in earlier decades - throwing out the baby with the bathwater). This is an example of the sort of memorising which I would retain - a calculator is only useful if double checked by "common sense" estimation, and memorised multiplication tables are part of the ease with mental arithmetic which is part of that:
Problem: volume of a cylindrical container, 1·8 metres high and 0·93 metres radius.
Formula: pi*r2*h
Rough estimate: 3*(0.5)2*2 = 3*0·25*2 = 6/4 = 1·5 m3
Calculator: pi*(0.93)2*18 = 48·908943 m3 [clearly something wrong - answer is about 30 times my estimate]
Check back: yes, I've squared the diameter instead of the radius, and missed out a decimal point in the 1·8 height.
Try again: pi*(0.93/2)2*1·8 = 1·222724 m3 [yup - same size as my estimate, so I'll trust it]
This is something we should all do, whenever we pick up a calculator (or, for that matter, a computer algebra program) but which I have great difficulty getting students to do. Actually, not just students ... a few years ago, a highly educated computer programmer of my acquaintance rejected a new pension plan after calculating that it would cost him 370 million pounds sterling - a quick mental estimate would have shown that he had missed out some decimal points along the way).
Multiplication tables are also an example of memorising which serves not only as factual resource but also as mental exercise.
What about all those poems that people used to memorize.
I am in two minds about that one. Mostly, though, I'm glad it's gone. I hated poetry at school; I only learned to love it (and I do love it - one of of life's transcendent gems) after the memorisation stopped. At the same time, poetry, like song (we come back to Dr C's evocation of Homer) is inherently memorable - rhyme, assonance and rhythm "fix" words and facts very effectively. The tables work that way - the rhythm of them is what enables their memorisation and recall.
That terrible death-to-joy memorisation wasn't limited to class poetry, either. I can still, forty five years after I last had to recite them, regurgitate the Gettysburg address and something called "the pledge to the flag". Both have a lyricism, but are permanently tied in my mind to tedium - I dredge them up only as part of funny anecdote hour.
God forbid that I should ever have to go through medical school again (a recurring nightmare) and face that memorization gauntlet.
Many examination processes are the same. In most cases they do little to test understanding or even recall. I do recognise, however, that medicine may be one field where they are more necessary than in most (I don't know that; i can just see what the argument might be). In general, though, this is an area which brings back Dr C's question about "How much should a person know (onboard v.s. access via, e.g., the Internet)?"
It's a valid and important question - and not just in relation to examinations, but the answer varies with context. My general answer would be "only as much as is useful; no more".
When I took my A-level math exams in 1970, I had to remember all sorts of stuff about the integration of different types of functions. Since then, have never used the memorised information: I have simply looked it up in a book (or, more recently, on the web). In real life, as long as I am within society's infrastructure, the important things are (a) knowing that the information exists (b) knowing where to look for it and (c) if necessary, knowing how to ask for expert help.
On the other hand, when I was working in the Sahara and Sahel, only the survival knowledge stored in my own brain was of any use to me ... all the stuff in a well stocked library of textbooks, from which I taught other people survival skills, was worthless. I suspect this is partly analogous to medicine - much is available in the literature to prepare for an operation, but when my hands are deep in somebody's guts and something terrible goes wrong, only what has lodged in my brain will get me (and the patient) through. Perhaps Dr C would confirm or reject this supposition - because I'm only theorising here.
Exactly how much information can someone know? ... Is there a threshold amount of information after which the brain starts kicking things out the other end (wherever that is).
Common sense suggests to me that there must be a finite limit to how much we can retain. What that might be, and whether we are anywhere close to it, I haven't the foggiest idea.
Science fiction has often played with this idea - either in relationship to immortality (how long would memory evolved or "designed" to serve a three score and ten years lifespan hold up?) or to locally specific information.
A Poul Andersen novel, Corridors of Time, for example, had characters entering (for example) Denmark in the tenth century pick up and insert in their ears "diaglossas" - devices which stored, and neurally imparted, temporary memory expansion on tenth century Danish language, culture, etc. Physical storage implants have also been popular - and more recently (as in Greg Bear's Eon et seq) those implants have been dynamically linked to external network sources like the internet. Another novel (author and title escape me) had immortals editing their memories daily, keeping what they valued and excising the rest, to make room for tomorrow.
On another front, Dr C cites and develops comments by Jim Putnam to consider pure and utilitarian views of information:
It casts information into a utilitarian role. Who would dispute that except perhaps an aesthete, i.e. one who valued information just for the sake of information. Perhaps an art connoisseur, or cellist. But then, you might rejoin that someone who just wanted pure information (if there is such a thing) was a dilettante.
Well ... I'm again in two minds about this one. I have sympathies on both sides. I have never been able to confine myself to either application or pure research, but I know the joy of each and would miss either drug. I am a dilettante on both counts ... but it seems to me that the pure academic with no interest in application is as committed as the pure implementer of the resulting information. I can't call either of them dilettante. In modern times (certainly the whole of my lifetime), when information has exploded beyond the possibility of one person ever holding more than a tiny fraction of it, there could be no further progress without both types of person: in effect, the blue sky thinker interested in information itself is the producer, the rest of us the consumers, of information. Perhaps that last sentence means that even for the pure theorist information has applied value, as a commodity underpinning her/his income ... oh, I don't know ... I give up! Pandora's box, as Dr C says.
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