Mason  🏃‍♂️ ✂️

I'm not denying that some students study very hard, or that some programs require something like an order of magnitude more content to be retained in the short- to medium-term. Just that there is a hard limit on how much content can be crammed this way, and it's a low ceiling

If it feels like school is an all-consuming slog, that's the feeling of fighting your brain -- which builds models, and has to consume and discard massive volumes of extraneous information. "This isn't extraneous!" It doesn't believe you, and you don't really believe you, either

I should note that there are (probably broadly trainable) strategies for massively improved rote memorization, but the very hacky way this works makes me very skeptical that information stored this way can be accessed for much more than basic call-and-response

(1) Tangentially, we did lose something when we moved away from 'classical' education techniques, even if we weren't aware then what those things were. From Norman Doidge's excellent The Brain that Changes Itself:

(2) "For hundreds of years educators did seem to sense that children's brains had to be built up through exercises of increasing difficulty that strengthened brain functions. Up through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries a classical education often included rote...

(3) ...memorization of long poems in foreign languages, which strengthened the auditory memory (hence thinking in language) and an almost fanatical attention to handwriting, which probably helped strengthen motor capacities and thus not only helped handwriting but added speed...

(4) ...and fluency to reading and speaking. Often a great deal of attention was paid to exact elocution and to perfecting the pronunciation of words... the loss of these drills has been costly; they may have been the only opportunity that many students had to systematically...

(5) ... exercise the brain function that gives us fluency and grace with symbols."