Knowing vs. looking it up

Memorization is not the same as learning.  Still, it has its uses.

It happens every year in the Precalc course: students work hard at learning trigonometry at the start of the school year, generally with success, and then go on to other subjects.  With the midterm or later reviews they find, to their dismay, that the hard-won knowledge has decayed.  They remember that they once could do things, but can’t remember how.  (A few unlucky students can’t recall even learning them in the first place.)  Our tutor’s assurances that relearning will be easier than learning, and that they’ll remember more the second time around, are not generally believed.

Well, we have long ago gotten away from the idea that learning is the same thing as having memorized a lot of things.  The nineteenth-century picture of students reciting the declensions of Latin nouns, subject to a stroke of the birch each time they made a mistake, was a staple of many writers.  Certainly it’s necessary if one wants to write good Latin prose, but it’s not sufficient, and if need be one can look it up (nowadays, on line).  Even back then Sherlock Holmes was depicted as saying (in A Study in Scarlet) that the human memory was limited, and one should not clutter it up with things that aren’t needed.

It’s not as simple as that, of course.  We are not faced with a simple choice of what to put in our 64TB of RAM.  Nor do we have to decide how much head space to give over to memory as opposed to CPU operations.  The human mind is far more flexible than that (and we speak only as users, not specialists who have studied the matter).

For one thing, memory works much like a muscle: the more you use it, the more you can use it.  It’s hard, at first, to commit to memory a whole Shakespearean sonnet.  But do it, and the second is easier, and soon you can rattle off hundreds of lines at a shot.  (Beware, though: poetry can be very tenacious.  Best choose your poems carefully, because they’ll still be there years later, when you least expect them.)

There still remain the questions: what should you memorize, and why?  If you can pull something off the internet with the touch of a bookmark, why go to the trouble of putting it in your head?  Certainly there’s no point with tables of numbers, those staples of pre-computer mathematics.

One would welcome the chance not to memorize Latin declensions, Spanish conjugations, or all the other tedious things in learning a foreign language.  But, alas, when discussing something at a Parisian bistro it’s unlikely your new friends would welcome a halt in the conversation every few words while you looked up a meaning or conjugation.

What about the details of narrative history: endless lists of names, events and dates, the bare bones of introductory courses?  They’ve been criticized almost as much as Latin grammar.  Surely they’re best left to the search engine.

But we think not.  It’s only when you have a framework of facts that you can see connections, look for causes and consequences, place things in context.  As we’ve noted, isolated facts are hard to hold on to; you need a structure before you can think about history.  In the same way but more intensely, you have to internalize a language before you can use it to communicate (and to think in).

If you leave all your memorization to the internet, you allow it to do all your thinking too.