Escape the Path that Leads to Intellectual ruin

Cram, pass and forget, were the words of ‘wisdom’ invented among students in a system of education that prioritised content and exams. Students grew to see education as a process of accumulating facts. Whether one understood the facts or not, was irrelevant. What was significant was whether you could hold them long enough to pass your exams. This wisdom, I saw, placed its followers on a path that had immediate ‘benefit’— they could pass their exams and soon forget— but I now see it was also leading to the erosion of their mental powers.

1.The Erosion of reasoning and thinking ability

Neuroscience bestows on us an eternal principal, “Use it or lose it”. Our faculties— memory, reason, imagination etc.— strengthen as we engage in work that calls them into action and weaken with disuse. It follows then that as we engage in memory work solely, the faculties we are not using will begin to weaken. Put another way, rote memorisation leaves our other faculties inactive, and what we don’t use, we lose. As we train our memory chiefly, we sacrifice our abilities to reason, imagine etc.

2.The erosion of independent thinking

Having not sufficiently developed our reasoning powers by activity, we make ourselves dependent on thinkers, people who can do more with knowledge than we have practiced. Rote memorisation prepares us for experiences where we simply have to recall ideas, but not for situations where we have to reason through and synthesise complex ideas. Unable to reason through ideas for ourselves, we’ll look to others to reason and explain ideas for us.

3.The Erosion of our interest in Learning

It is practicing thinking that leads to more thinking, and since education will progressively call us to more and more thinking, it follows that if we only study by rote memorisation, we’ll be poorly prepared for our future education.

Whatever your journey has been, you can become a greater thinker, by engaging in ways of studying that call into action your thinking and reasoning capacities. It is this kind of studying that positions you to bring value to the world.