After being in BITS for some 18 months, one thing in which I have miserably failed, is quizzing. I am often stunned by the amount of stuff people remember and after every quiz that I attend, I wonder how these guys manage to recall things effortlessly.
Memorizing is an integral part of our society and has been a part from many, many years ago when students were asked to mug up thousands of shlokas and mantras by their guru. There were thousands of methods presented by vedic mathematics which could be memorized for speedy calculations. We too, as students, grew up cramming many things in our minds. Right from nursery rhymes, mathematical tables to many different variations of the same formula. “…….Son, quickly recite ‘twinkle twinkle’ and show uncle how smart you are” ………haven’t we heard this countless times during our childhood. Throughout our school life we gobble up standard solutions, formulas, maps, names, answers. Our education system and the environment we are brought up in makes us very efficient in memorizing. Our parents, teachers and the entire society shoves us in to the rat race of getting good grades and we, very conveniently, mug up stuff as that’s what we are efficient at. We hardly ever try out things on our own, develop unique methods, learn by analyzing stuff instead of just ctrl-c and ctrl-ving things. Knowing things, remembering stuff is an extremely difficult task and being efficient at memorizing stuff is indeed very useful and essential. Remembering more stuff enhances one’s ability to inter-relate and reason out logically as lesser would be the assumptions in his logic. So developing a good memory is essential; however it shouldn’t be the only motive in the learning process. Further, according to me the weightage given to memorizing should be lesser than that given to development of analytical and reasoning abilities. Here are the reasons why I think so:
1. With technology advancing and availability of calculators, google, Wikipedia etc. we have access to whatever information we need. Also, the access to these things is becoming easier and faster day by day.
2. Practical applications demand analytical reasoning much more than memorizing.
3. Memorizing a piece of code or design of a machine won’t make anyone an efficient engineer.
4. Most of the inventions made were not due to inventors remembering stuff which others didn’t. Rather, it was the way inventors perceived facts known to many.
5. As per the present scenario, finding a substitute for human memory seems much more feasible than replication of the ‘thinking’ part of the human brain.
Many inventions were made last century and the contribution of Indians to them is relatively insignificant. I am of the opinion that the major reason for this is not lack of resources but our attitude towards learning. The process of learning should be such that it is more of an encouragement to think and reason out stuff rather than just cluttering of our minds with information. It is high time that we start taking measures to ensure such kind of learning process. And as I mentioned before a good memory is the cherry on the cake……but not the cake.
