About memorizing

Two friends takes a walk in the park. One of them say: How beautiful here, what nice trees. The other who is a botanical not only know the names of the trees and the flowers, he also know their history and why the look like they do. That's why his experience of the walk in the park becomes much richer.

As humans our relation to our environment doesn't become as naturally and engaged, when we have to look things up on a computer or in a book every time we encounter something. It is a poor experience of the world and the cause of it is, that we seem to give up on the inner life. An inner life is important in the matter of living a good life.

We forget to remember.

Information just pass through us. It has been such an integrated part of our life that we don’t even notice it.

Once reading a book was not only an experience. It was an investment, because the book became a part of who you were. You could memorize it and quote from it.

This is not an argument for rote learning. But to learn new things depends on relating it to previous knowledge. Creating new Knowledge demands old knowledge to build on. Sure our school system has to teach children to be sensible and creative, but they also need some basic knowledge to orient themselves from.

We should not forget this old knowledge.

This words are my translation of fragments of an interview with the American author Joshua Foer as it was to read in the Danish Newspaper Kristeligt Dagblad, April 17. 2013.

A Luhmann Lesson  

Niklas Luhmann (December 8, 1927 – November 6, 1998) was a German sociologist, and a prominent thinker in sociological systems theory.

This is my interpretation of some of the things Niklas Luhmann has said or suggested. 

Students should not learn about environment anymore. Well, we should not put it that way. It is much more personal and individual talking about it as ecology. That is a more including word because it contains a thought of living in it. It is equating the individual and the nature.

The student is not a trivial machine. A trivial machine is only giving answers according to the information its programmed with. If you treat students like such a machine you only accept answers that is strictly correct according to the textbook. No place for individual thinking.

Reality has through the sciences imposed a special terminology. But reality can not be recognized by a form of words. Reality can be described as systems which serve to communicate. Communication creates reality and the dynamics of the system.

School is an institution where the input can be observed. But it is as a kind of black box because what happens in it is unpredictable. Similarly, the outputs.

(My addition:This is not an argument for not trying to educate children as good as possible. Because as more knowledge and learning that occur as greater the chance that something reasonably is happening.)