At least according to Ben Orlin, a teacher who wants less memorization in education:
Memorization has enjoyed a surge of defenders recently. They argue that memorization exercises the brain and even fuels deep insights. They say our haste to purge old-school skills-driven teaching from our schools has stranded a generation of students upriver without a paddle. They recommend new apps aiming to make drills fun instead of tedious. Most of all, they complain that rote learning has become taboo, rather than accepted as a healthy part of a balanced scholastic diet.
Certainly, knowledge matters. A head full of facts – even memorized facts – is better than an empty one. But facts enter our heads through many paths – some well-paved, some treacherous.
After pointing to several of those paths, Orlin outlines better ways for “students [to] learn facts, rather than memorize them”:
For example, suppose we’re learning that Maryland fought with the Union during the Civil War. We could invent a mnemonic, like “Maryland starts with ‘marry,’ and a marriage is a union” – cheesy, but fine. Or we could build on other facts. For example, Maryland borders D.C., so if it had seceded, the American capital would have been surrounded by foreign territory. For exactly that reason, Lincoln worked hard to keep Maryland on the side of the North.
What separates memorization from learning is a sense of meaning. When you memorize a fact, it’s arbitrary, interchangeable–it makes no difference to you whether sine of π/2 is one, zero, or a million. But when you learn a fact, it’s bound to others by a web of logic. It could be no other way.
The Dish 