@ President Eden
thanks for a thoughtful response.

it gives me a much better idea of what you want in an education system and i can agree with a lot of your "aspirations"


i agree that the last thing we need from our education systems are programs that
only teach a "narrow" curriculum, that do not teach critical thinking, analysis skills etc.

you clearly see the need to offer study options in the "liberal arts" & history et al
which I also would generally support

one of the other contributors touched on the changing way we need to teach with the
rote learning comments

it can be argued that there is too much information for rote learning to be used
( other than at a basic building block level ) & that skills in research, sourcing
information, critical analysis, data manipulation skills etc are far more useful
than "learning a static register of information "

Is using mnenomics a form of rote learning ?

it's good to see you are thinking beyond "demolish the failed system"

I actually think mnemonic devices are an application of critical thinking to the task of rote memorization. Take the knuckle method of remembering the Gregorian calendar, for instance - where you simply count off the months starting with your leftmost knuckle going right, and all the months on knuckles represent 31-day months. That's not just memorizing the months; you're taking a specific piece of information, a pattern, about the months and creatively applying it to something completely unrelated so you can learn the months more efficiently. Mnemonics are effective, I think, specifically *because* they go beyond rote memorization and employ your critical thinking capacities. I can say at least for myself that that's usually the case for me.

Now, true, just regurgitating mnemonic devices without considering them is just a more efficient means of memorization. Hopefully, though, the revelation of mnemonic devices to a student can spark that student's creative thinking and lead the student to find his or her own... and even if the student fails in that attempt, merely attempting to do so requires critical thinking, which is already an improvement and a worthy means in and of itself.

So fire away with your Roy G. Bivs and your Thirty Days Hath Septembers, I say, because in creating them and in considering them you're employing your brain more constructively than you would be just memorizing colors and months without them.

Rote learning is good for the soul.

@pe, i disagree with you on mnemonic devices. They may indeed be more efficient, but i don't think that necessarily means using critical reasoning skills.

There are examples of people using spatial memory to remember things more easily, and this is highly efficient, using a mnemonic just uses one identifier, or story/sentence and allpws the information to be extracted using the associations built in... It still seems to me to be mostly associative memory - though stories are easier to recall, thus more effective

Well, not to regurgitate them, of course. I think creating them takes something extra, though - maybe "critical thought" isn't the right term, but the point is that creating a mnemonic device and thinking about one that's been created is more than just plain memorization and involves your brain more, so I tend to favor that.

The real irony behind mnemonics is that we moved tobacco lot of acronyms - sort of reverse mnemonics if you will. And with that and the advent of texting came a use of acronyms in everyday communication, not just texting but email and places like our forum. But that itself has actually improved our reasoning skills as we not only have to translate the acronyms into words bit sometimes deduce what a me acronym means based on the context in which it is used.

Oh and thebironic aspect is how you always hear how dumped down our communication is getting when we are still having to think and sometimes think harder when both reading and writing the messages.

Like with your smartphone's forum posting. ;) I caught almost all of that, "tobacco" is throwing me off though.

"The ironic", not "tobacco" (I think that's the reference you meant). And yeah smartphones are named so because they make us smarter trying to figure out what their autocorrect screwed up. :-)

well "if I was in charge of things" I'd certainly make changes in public education here.
for a start where fees are charged at the tertiary level, I'd have a merit based rebate.
so if you pass the subject at your first attempt, you get a reduction in fees,
the reduction % increases for the mark acheived, eg get a "distinction" ie a 90% plus
result then get bigger reduction in fees.

But if you take up a students slot and don't perform, you pay full fees.

Govt's always seem to prefer the "stick to the carrot" when trying to "control / limit
behaviour
eg punishment for breaking laws
there's a balance, or imbalance between punishment & reward by govt
yet I think that humans respond better to reward incentive than they do to
punishment deterent

The problem with that in the US is tertiary education institutions are usually funded by those fees. Sure, many get some government money ("public" universities like University of Cincinnati and Ohio State) but even those still rely on those fees to meet their budgets. The scholarships that students get aren't provided by the universities but by private organizations or government programs and the schools still get their money, just from a different source than the students pocket or loan account. So to reduce fees by marks achieved would require the government to fund that program and then truly private schools wouldn't be able to compete with the big public ones. I mean, the liberals would be up in arms if a Catholic university like Xavier started getting even more funds from the feds for a program like that.