The Evil that Schools Do
by pwceducationreform
Anyone who has paid the least bit of attention to education reforms in the past 20 – 30 years knows that rote memorization, or drill and kill, are the single worst things a developing child can be exposed to. Not only does rote memorization take the joy out of learning, it undermines children’s ability to understand numbers and arithmetic operations. Teachers forcing children to memorize math facts to automatic recall are committing what can only be characterized as educational malpractice. In this modern era the focus in education is on deeper understanding, critical thinking, and developing 21st Century skills, not on creating a generation of robots who mindlessly repeat steps they don’t understand.
Too bad those promises aren’t based on actual science. You know data, from actual studies, conducted by actual scientists and peer reviewed, that show that rote memorization undermines learning. Because the studies, the actual science and data, show the opposite.
The Journal of Neuroscience recently published a study conducted by two professors of neuroscience from the University of
