Rote learning and the art of forgetting

Rote memorization is the technique that most students arrive at first.

It's the method of trying to learn new information by repeated repetition.

To be the best learners or students that we can be, we have to ask the question: is it the way to go?

Is rote memorization the best way of learning new material?

The question becomes even more important because it's relied upon by most students, most of the time.

If it does work, where should we be using it and where does it work best?

And if it doesn't work, what can we use instead?

What would give us an edge, and help us achieve excellent results?

Rote learning has an ancient and interesting history, especially with the Victorians. It was their preferred method of learning new material; people who could rote learn huge amounts of information garnered a lot of respect. It's this emphasis that continues to permeate much of the learning in educational systems today. If you ever had to learn your times tables, and recite 2x2=4, 2x3=6 and so on, you'll know what I mean - this was rote learning.

Rote learning seems to occurs best when we're exposed to the same information at different times and in different ways. A lot of the background information we hear in the media and from politicians occurs this way - we learn it without realizing, because we've heard it so many times.

How useful is rote learning when it comes to students and their exams? This was being researched as far back as 1885 by Hermann von Ebbinghaus, who tried to learn and relearn lists of 2000 syllables using rote learning. He found that much of what he learnt was very quickly forgotten and that random material which meant little to him was forgotten more easily than words that had more meaning.

He also found that if he tried to relearn the material, he could relearn it more quickly than the first time round, implying that part of the difficulty was trying to recall the material rather than the brain having completely forgotten it.

This means that information learned this way is very rarely forgotten completely - but that we need strategies for being able to recall the information at will and when needed.

Rote learning has a long and distinguished history, from the ancients, who had no access to books and needed to commit large amounts of information to memory, to the religious institutions who emphasized the importance of knowing sacred scriptures by heart, and the Victorians whose imprint continues to affect us today.

The question we have to ask ourselves in the 21st Century:

Is there a better way to learn facts for our exams and for our jobs? - and the clear answer is yes.

But to learn this, we need to go back to the Ancient Greeks and the deaths of the Greeks at a party that Simonides was attending...