On Education

By now, if you have read at least 3 of the entries in this blog you probably realized that my preoccupation with various ideas is not very persistent. The plus however is that I focus on a lot of various domains. Today we shall speak about an interesting mail that I received one of these days.

I will quote the mail, hoping that there will not be any copyright problems. Neither the question, nor the mail are written by me. I have received them because I have subscribed to a mailing list called "The Art of Memory". However, they resonated somehow with the ideas I had regarding the schooling system.

> Has anyone ever taught the memory systems to students?
>  
 
My wife is a school teacher, and we have talked about this
a lot.  It seems that, at least in the U.S. there are many
in the educational establishment who believe that mnemonics 
are:
1) a cheap trick perfomed by show off's
2) the people who use mnemonics are mental freaks.  You see 
when someone demonstrates mnemonics to a group of educators, 
it makes them look dumb or stupid.  They don't like looking 
stupid.  Therefore, the person using mnemonics is a freak.
 
All of this goes back the 18th and 19th centuries when there 
was a push to introduce mnemonics into the school system and 
it was defeated because mnemonics would:
 
1) make learning too easy!  That's right.  Many people at the
 time wanted schools to teach rigid dicipline to prepare 
students for the repetitive work of the industrial world.  
Rote learning with its constant repitition of the same thing 
seemed the perfict analog to the repetitive processes of 
machines.
 
2) the imagination, fantasy and mental images used in mnemonics 
were greatly discouraged because they "broke down mental 
dicipline".
 
This concern with dicipline is very real.  The primary problem 
faced by teachers is keeping order among 20 or so children.  
This is no small feat. Anything that detracts from the teachers 
ability to maintain controll of the classroom does not have a 
chance of being adopted.
 
> I've often wondered why the mnemonic systems are not being 
> taught in school systems.
>  
 
I know the above is a very incomplete explanation.  But these 
are some of the reasons mnemonics and the Art of Memory are not 
used in schools.
 
Byron