SCHOOL FOR THOUGHT

The Importance of Rote Learning

Guest Editorial by Frank Gue, a member of the SQE board and a retired engineer

In the  December 17 issue of The Economist entitled The One-Shot Society, one reads “[South] Korean education results are the envy of the world.”  A few pages later appear the words: “[South Korea] cannot become creative with a school system that stresses rote learning above creative thinking.”

Without discussing the separate subject of pressures and suicides, one must note that these two statements are incompatible.  Every human creative accomplishment springs from a platform of rote learning with which it is inextricably linked when one operates creatively.

Consider a jet airliner, than the designing of which there are few activities more creative.  Its engineer, thinking at a very high, abstract level, speculates:  “We could improve fuel efficiency if we ... ” and there floods into her consciousness a veritable tsunami of rote learned facts and formulae that are instantly available from her well-stocked mind.  Into this rote-learned stew she blends the new, creative, original idea that ends up as a faster, more comfortable, less expensive method of flitting about the globe as we so casually do.  Without her rote-learned knowledge of such abstracts as centres of gravity, lift, and drag, of leverages and aerodynamic centres, and a thousand similar things, her creative processes would never have a chance.

How did she get there?  Certainly not by avoiding rote-learned multiplication tables as some Western elementary school students are forced to do, sometimes with tears of frustration, when they perform a fiddly finger-counting exercise in order to multiply 6 x 7.

So don’t casually dismiss rote learning as you drive home tonight on the correct rote-learned side of the road, signaling your turns in a rote-learned manner, obeying signs the meanings of which you have rote learned, and ............