By Alexandros Sainidis
Have you watched Akeelah and the Bee, the spelling bee movie? I stumbled upon this movie on TV when I was a kid and it was the piece of media that introduced me to using flashcards. Flashcards are based on some very simple mechanisms. You see a hint or a prompt on one side of the card and you try to remember the answer. Then, once you make your guess, you flip the card and reveal yourself the answer. Whether wrong or right, it strengthens the links that hold the memory of this information. Once you are done with all the cards, you mix them and try again. The randomness of sequence next time you play this set is part of the design to strengthen your memory. Flashcards highlight the value of memory. But is memory really appreciated now?
It’s always flattering to remember something about a person; small details that would otherwise go unnoticed. On a date, it is a display of attention, building the intimacy of little secrets shared – even if they aren’t really secrets. Same applies to diplomats and other types of representatives. Remembering something from the past warms up the conversation to come, influencing opinions and negotiations. But what happened to remembering the whole phone number of a friend? What happened to education focusing on critical thinking at the cost of forgetting everything else?
In the videogame Baldur’s Gate 3, the fiend Yurgir is bound by a contract that has no small print. This is because he remembers his agreement in the form of a song. The protagonist here has a dialogue option to ask “Is your contract a song?”.
And the fiend answers – “Parchment can burn. Oral agreements aren’t worth the tongues they’re waggled out upon. A song lingers.” Here the fiend refers to the immutability of a contract and indeed even while writing was already a thing, literally marking the start of history, many cultures would preserve the memories of generations in the forms of songs. Songs are entertaining enough to engage children, the next generation, and they can be sung by parents and relatives who are illiterate.
Books, however, though they also are immutable designs of information, when produced on a mass scale (in small numbers they can be tampered with), and, in general, written information is a result of outsourcing memory. This is great when you need to manage a lot of information, a lot of knowledge. You forget something? Time to revisit the book. Need to remember the agenda of a meeting? Write it down – amazing. About to die? Write a book so that your research and experiences are not lost with your death.
Today, people remember less. Is the culprit the attention span decreasing because of TikTok? Is it the parents shoving the iPad in children’s faces in exchange for a few minutes of peace? A lot of readers will think at this point that my problem here is Artificial Intelligence. Surely, having such a virtual assistant is the main problem, right? Not quite. After all, even writing down information is something that changes how we use memory. In contrast, I believe that the problem is mostly cultural and pretty global.
On paper, all educational systems prioritize critical thinking over plain remembering and understanding. On paper. It makes sense and sounds appealing. After all, critical thinking is transversal, meaning that you will use it across many subjects. It even makes you a better citizen, since you have the tools to demand better conditions from your government and criticize policies. Let’s take, however, another piece of wisdom here for comparison. It is said that those who don’t know history repeat it, which sounds a lot like a case of memory. How do you correct the policy if you don’t remember the state’s history, the history of policies, as well as the prior contexts and balances of these policies?
At the same time, most educational systems actually fail to assess critical thinking and tend to test their students on how well they can memorize, in an off putting copy-paste manner. This makes it a double failure, because students learn to hate memorizing. Then young people are exposed to garbage motivational advice. The biggest piece of unintentional trash I have ever heard is a quote by David Allen – “The mind is for having ideas, not holding them.” This is amazingly convenient because learning is quite hard. But since people tend to overestimate their own abilities, coming as overconfident agents, it’s a very convenient way to dodge the hard part of learning through memorization and jump to the conclusion that one can think critically simply by intending to do so.
Don’t get me wrong. It is extremely important to note things and tasks, especially at work where stakes are high. But it’s completely different from not participating in other learning processes that require that you struggle remembering something – just as one would with the flashcards. What do you mean by open book exams and allowing using ChatGPT to write an essay? This is blasphemy. When you will be an ambassador negotiating an agreement with a country, you don’t get to use those tools. Your decisions will be a result of your own mental library and how well it is being unravelled during a long, tiring conversation.
Another part of people dismissing the value of memory is the expectation that something must be useful right here and right now for it to be valuable. For example, one may remember an experience or a historical event. On its own it might not mean much for decades. But one day, we may change our thinking, or find another piece of information that has value in combination with that memory you were holding, like a lost piece of a jigsaw puzzle. This is why it is important to enjoy learning and experiencing for the sake of it, rather than for utility. You simply have no idea when something will be useful, if it ever will.
So what should schools do? Teach both and teach them well. Of course we need critical thinking. It is the basis of mental models and paradigm shifts that help them stay relevant. But let’s not forget that the very basis of critical thinking is memory and comprehension. The key word is curiosity. It is curiosity that keeps you digging in knowledge and data, uncovering patterns that form critical thinking. Memory is the raw material and thinking is the processing of that material. This is not an attack against technology, precisely because technology is facing the same problem right now. No matter how much you improve an AI model or an algorithm, you need better data, the equivalent of memory – the raw material of knowledge.
