this post was submitted on 02 Dec 2023
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chapotraphouse
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What actually is the focus on memorising for? Like even my English lit exams i had to memorise the quotes i was going to use for an essag question i didn't know yet.
How does this serve capitalism?
to grind you down for a life time of "because i said so"s at work.
I think it's probably because recall is often a demonstration of proficiency - think how consuming/reading language is easier than producing/writing it. Not the only sign of proficiency, but one of them.
On the other hand, we benefit more from current technology by being proficient with references, and proficiency over an entire field is now inefficient and/or unattainable. Even in languages - native languages at that - most of us only become proficient at producing contemporary styles, whereas it often takes specialists to decypher old texts with appropriate linguistic and historical context. But now chatbots can fill in for the specialist by acting as a more widely available and in-depth reference, I guess.
systems don't have to be good they have to be good enough
our education system basically produces as many people as we need taught to the standard we need. It isn't better because it doesn't have to be and institutions have inertia
Related to liberal philosophy and psychology, I think, the whole "rational actors" perspective of the human being. That we are machines that take some input and spit out an output in reliable and accurate ways. The ones who don't are ignored as part of humanity to maintain the definition.
Another way to look at education is that it is a factory line to output workers to exploit for labor. The defects are discarded, and the ones who make it out are the ones who somehow take any input and reliably accurate and exploitable output (labor)
Which is why graduates of most fields have no experience and function on cultivated instincts like memorization. Only when a worker works with their actual hands, so to speak, do they learn real knowledge of their labor. This is how education used to be, an apprenticeship sort of model, which you still see in certain trades and fields like the medical field.
Memorization predates capitalism. So I'd look for reasons in pre-capital societies
As I understand it we imported it from China because it was a system that allowed education at greater scale than Europes previous system of having a conversation with the examiner. It lets lots of people sit the same exam at once
to say capitalism strives for greater efficiency is false it strives for greater scale
Now we stick with it because we've been doing it 200 years and people are used to it
It’s much easier to make and grade an exam that’s based on memorisation than on understanding. Such exams are also less prone to biased grading.
Even bourgeois media has an obsession with memorization. What do Hollywood writers do when they want to quickly get across that a character is smart? They have him (usually a man) quote some old book/play word for word, often at length. Turns out memorizing things is a skill that almost anyone can learn and get good at. But it’s treated like some super power.
Looking forward to the Communist utopia where doctor has to look up the difference between glucagon and glycogen
This but unironically, double checking prevents errors and you make more mental connections when you look things up.
the maoist uprising against the landlords was the largest and most comprehensive proletarian revolution in history, and led to almost totally-equal redistribution of land among the peasantry
Honestly good. Students learn to just memorize what they need for the test and no further, then dump most of that afterwards. "memorizing" and retaining are different things
If modern China's not bourgeois then explain this Dengists 
The Prussian model of memorization and taking notes worked back when it was a small number of students learning from experts in niche areas. Now that we have printing presses and you are not expected to reference your college notes in your professional career the model has outlived it's usefulness