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Why Children Should Not Be Learning Through Rote Methods Tweet
At the recent Singapore National Education Conference, Professor Allan Snyder (PhD), director of The Centre for the Mind and a co-founder of Emotiv Systems shared why normal children should not be learning through rote methods.
Professor Snyder holds degrees from Harvard, Massachusetts Institute of Technology and University College, London.
To explain his point Professor Snyder shared the example of a 3 year-old autistic savant artist who is able to draw pictures with photographic realism, but yet cannot appreciate the meaning. He contrasted this to normal children, who do not draw exactly what they see. They draw symbols of what they know — caricatures and concepts — without being able to consciously recall or reproduce the actual details that comprise the concept.
This just goes to show that our brains have developed to extract meaning and formulate concepts. Once a concept arises, we inhibit the literal details that make up its meaning. So any educational program that stresses rote memory is at odds with our intrinsic brain design. “Rote-memorizing imposes autistic-like routines on our otherwise healthy conceptual minds. The autistic mind is so concerned with specific details that it has difficulty grasping the big picture,” shares Professor Snyder.
He goes on to add that a healthy mind actually finds it difficult to memorize facts divorced from meaning. It is meaning that ties facts together into a coherent framework. “The healthy mind rapidly grasps the gist of things, effortlessly recalling situations as a whole. So, we need to teach through big picture concepts, by emphasizing the essence of things. Our minds are exquisitely tuned to receiving this kind of information.”
He further discounts the need for rote learning by expounding that through the Google revolution, rote memorizing has literally become redundant. “All of us can now instantly acquire knowledge about anything. Mere factual knowledge no longer commands the respect and admiration that it once did.”
He suggests that educators take advantage of this by spending less time on drills and formulas, and more time on nurturing creativity. “Creative minds weave disparate facts into a new synthesis, taking ideas from one domain and combining them imaginatively with ideas from another domain, building something new. This is what educational programs should cultivate.”
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Rote learning is terrible. Singapore need to move away from their archaic learning style and be a little more progressive
Hi,
I agree that rote learning serves little or purpose, but I can think of a few cases where it is useful, in fact when learning the alphabet it is important to learn the order as well as the names of the characters, otherwise ‘alphabetical order’ becomes meaningless. Then there is the spelling of English words, many of which bear little resemblance to their pronunciation. The multiplication tables are another example of useful rote learning. However these examples are probably the exception to the rule and anyway are not what prompted me to comment.
It is the use of the word “normal”. Are you trying to stigmatise autistic children in some way? By comparing autistic children with “normal” children are you leaving out all the other “abnormal” children? Say, for example, deaf or blind or the very tall or short or children from single parent families or gay and lesbian children? What exactly is meant by “normal”? How were these children called in the original study that you are quoting? Do “normal” children all have an IQ of 100, neither more nor less? Are they all from “good, middle-class” families? As the study was carried out in America, I imagine they were referring to “White Anglo-Saxon Protestants” or “WASPs”.
Would it have been too awkward to refer to the control group of children as “non-autistic”? Or maybe someone knows a better term, but “normal” sounds just a little bit fascist, it was the fascists and nazis that started the eugenic program of mass slaughter of everyone considered “abnormal”. They started with the disabled, slow learners, dyslexics before moving on to gypsies, Jews and communists.
furthermore…
I’ve just visited Prof Snyder’s website (http://www.centreforthemind.com) and found the following:
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In this quote he refers to “savants” and “healthy” people, however in other papers they refer to “normal” people. Sounds too much like fascism to me… In case you’re wondering, I have what has been described as an “ultra high” IQ and consequently have been very interested in the whole eugenics/fascism debate for a long time. Needless to say I’m entirely against any form of eugenic program, and have been an anti-fascist since I was a teenager.
Love thy neighbour,
Lol
oops, forgot to add: not America, but Sydney, Australia.
Peace etc
Lol
the missing quote:
The astonishing skills of savants have been suggested to exist in everyone, but are not normally accessible without some form of brain impairment. We attempt to simulate such brain impairment in healthy people by directing low-frequency magnetic pulses into the left front-temporal lobe, a site implicated in the savant condition.