"Education" system is based on memorization. If you're able to memorize stuff short term, you'll pass the exam and be considered as "educated" academic citizen, not as "memory efficient" citizen.

Let that sink in

Sadly, yes.

that's because our educational system wasn't created for teaching, it's to get us used to work. if it was meant for teaching we'd be taught to correct our mistakes and wouldn't be punished for them. most of my professors do a lot of practical tasks and no tests. it's kinda pointless to quiz us, we can just google that shit, it's better to see if we can apply the theory

But isn't that actually 'efficient' ? Like high speed ram.

I've always passed exams purely by studying a few days before. Others started weeks before... That is not really memory efficient. The only goal at that point is to just pass the test.

And yes, I still know Thales's theorem but who has used it once in most software/ERP dev situations ?

@darksideofyay THIS! I was a lecturer for the past 12 years at a German university and an Austrian University of applied sciences. My students got points when knowledge was applied correctly to solve a problem and for improvements. Just repeating facts got them nothing.

As a lecturer at university it was my decision how I grade my students. I could let them write a test (easy to grade) or I could give them a problem to solve (hard to grade). I. did the last thing.

@lastNick Damn, lucky students who got a teacher like you.

To bad my German is not that good to start studying there haha.

Maybe that is why I liked math and the other problem solving classes more than the 'learn 20 pages word for word and you pass'-class.

@Grumm When I studied (in Germany) we got points for literally remembering the exact class and method names of Java code.

Depends heavily on country and school. In one school I attended growing up in Sweden, parents used to criticise the system for NOT drilling enough fact memorization and being too much about general problem solving methodology.

I think memorization is good, sometimes the learning comes after.

@jiraTicket I don’t see the issue, Einstein itself told “Never memorise something that you can look up.” and he lived before knowledge accessible 24/7 on the Internet. As long as you can memorise stuff you use very often (I cringe when I see full stack or FE devs with 1+ year of experience still googling how to center a div) I don’t see the issue. In fact once I read an interview to an accomplished mathematician which regarding the importance of memorisation in math he told which sometimes he still confuses numerator and denominator, despite that he was successful in his field.

@DEVil666 I think most would agree with your examples. With a normal education you touch on all the basic facts, and it’s fine to forget things you rarely use because you at least have an idea of what it’s about and what to look for when reminding yourself of the exact detsild.

The issue was they went too far and didn’t teach basics. To exaggreate it’d be like not mentioning which decade WW2 ended in because ”you can look it up” and then being expected to come up with a deeper analysis of modern european history

There’s levels of going too far in each direction with most probably drilling facts and missing some of the big picture but in my case it was the opposite and the lack of facts hurt the big picture