Terri took me to task for that post on memorization a few days ago, because the author is kind of a conservative crank. I confess, I hadn’t really read it fully, and I do find that I strongly disagree with most of what he says. I posted it because I thought defending something as universally reviled as rote memorization itself was an interesting contrarian viewpoint.

I do think a lot about how humans use information technology, and by not needing to retain information in their actual memory because they can look things up easily, I can see people lose the ability to think in certain ways. I honestly think computers are a much bigger factor in people losing their memory than any educational ideology. And the shift happened well before 1970; I don’t know that most baby-boomers could recite any Coleridge for you.

And as an aside, I’ve never heard any educational philosophy that rang true. All I know is that the only purely positive educational experience I’ve ever had was CTY and it falls well outside any label of progressive or conservative.

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