Edu-Babble, Part III

How does one "holistically" learn simple arithmetic and multiplication tables? What about the important dates surrounding historical events along a two-thousand-year-long continuum? What of the key dates of the literature and philosophy of that period? There's no way to do besides memorizing. The skeleton or framework of such an understanding is essential before a deeper, analytical understanding can bear fruit. But you'd never know it with the silly, lazy, prejudicial attack by the progressivist on "rote learning."

Rote learning. Rote learning used to mean asking an entire class to recite in unison answers to set questions, whether or not they understood the meaning of the question or the answer. Today, educators define rote learning variously as 'spouting words,' 'memorization without understanding,' and isolated facts. The teachers feel that these things prevent students from becoming independent thinkers. Hirsch admits that all of these concerns are valid. However, "it is better to encourage the integrated understanding of knowledge over the merely verbal repetition of separate facts. It is better for students to think for themselves than merely to repeat what they have been told. For all of these reasons, rote learning is inferior to learning that is internalized and can be expressed in the student's own words. These valid objections to purely verbal, fragmented, and passive education have, however, been used as a blunt instrument to attack all emphasis on factual knowledge and vocabulary ... In the progressive tradition, the attack on rote learning (timely in 1918) has been used to attack factual knowledge and memorization, to the great disadvantage of our children's academic competencies." - E. D. Hirsch

It's complete nonsense that inculcating the habit of memorization in the young leads to the eclipse of their imagination. (I've yet to read, by the way, a modern progressivist text that contains an adequate understanding of the imagination, but more on that later). If anything, memory is foundational to all learning and to the exercise of the imagination. The imagination cannot exercise itself without content. For what is the imagination but the likening of ideas thought previously to be dissimilar? Young children memorize baseball scores, the stats for various race cars, and the types and kinds of plants, trees, and animals in their pictures books. If stimulated, they can learn simple math and historical dates. If encouraged, they can learn large swaths of great poetry. The last is particularly important because it inculcates a respect for the precise use of language, the benefits of which are intellectual, and psychological among others (perhaps) more beneficient to the American marketplace.