Two learning strategies for back to school.

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My memory has never been what it used to be, and I can’t remember when I last spoke about this.

There are two main strategies for dealing with Education-style information.

The first method is to learn it thoroughly.  You’re probably thinking: now just a minute; isn’t this the whole idea of education?  But if you think about it a little more, you realize that to “learn” something is generally understood to be simply to remember the fact.  Now, wait, you say, learning is not merely remembering ... is it?  Over the decades we’ve come to believe that learning is a particularly good kind of remembering, the officially sanctioned form of remembering.  In other words, learning is (supposed to be) definitely higher up in the ranks of skills than mere memorizing.

Well, you’re going to have to deal with this cognitive dissonance yourself; as far as I’m concerned, we may as well fold the meanings of the words learning, remembering, and memorizing into one: they all have to do with mere recall.  I’m about to say that learning (with a view to remembering) is not at all a bad thing, but before I do that, I have to say some other things.

The second strategy is to find a logical reason why the fact you’re trying to assimilate is a consequence of other things you know.  In other words, if possible, you want to find a reason for the particular fact.

Everyone will agree that if all your information falls into a logical structure, you’re a lot better off than “merely remembering” the facts.  (Let me tell you, the older you get, the more likely you are to be able to use the logical structure way of figuring things out than the pure recall way.  On the other hand, I do know people who are really old who say things like: don’t ask me why; I just remember that it is true.)

Somehow, it seems, kids these days want a reason for everything.  On the face of it, this is good; it is always better to have a reason than not to have a reason.  But it is best of all to figure the reason out for yourself, rather than to be simply handed a reason on demand.  This has more to do with psychology than with learning (though current education theory seems not to have a dividing line between psychology and education, which is unfortunate).  A child that has to work to understand something is better off than a child on whom understanding is laid with no effort.

This is where things get complicated.  On one hand, it is always better to have a reason for everything, than to accept things as divine laws.  On the other hand, it is sometimes beneficial to simply learn something provisionally, with the intention of eventually finding a reason for it.  Why?  Because, very often, you end up learning a large number of similar cases; the facts (for which you still don’t know a reason) line up with an entire array of similar facts.  One day you could stumble upon a reason for one of the facts, which could immediately suggest analogous reasons for all of them.  At this point, you have figured out the reasons for all of the facts, and let me tell you, the resulting epiphany will be very powerful.

The big skill is in knowing how long to wait before you must have a reason for something.  You most certainly don’t want to wait forever, hoping for the epiphany to arrive.  On the other hand, you don’t want to get impatient and demand an explanation right away.  There is some ideal wait time, and some people have greater tolerance for accepting certain types of facts without justification than others do, and their facility to understand things, and absorb the larger picture are accordingly different.  But remembering and reasoning both have their place in your overall learning strategy.

A final word.  Learning, even if it is a matter of remembering, need not be simply memorizing at all.  For instance, if you must remember a list, there are strategies for breaking it up, or organizing it into sub-lists, which help the remembering process.  For instance, suppose you’re trying to  remember the Ten Commandments.  You could write them down briefly, and then classify them as political axioms, social rules, labor laws, etc.  This simple divide-and-conquer method works for almost anything.  The same method works for remembering the amendments to the Constitution, for instance.  If they are listed in chronological order, we should be able to group them in clusters that have some common theme.  In historical or political matters, this sort of learning is the closest one can come to having logical reasons for facts, since logic is not a large part of human behavior.

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