Memorization takes place in the classroom.
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The film "The Wall," directed by Alan Parker and released in 1982, is a dramatization of the album of the same name by the British rock band Pink Floyd. In one scene, the teacher humiliates a student who "thinks he's a poet." Dismissing the boy's writings as "absolute rubbish," the teacher orders the class back to work, repeating with him, "An acre is the area of a rectangle whose length is a furlong and whose width is a chain. An acre is the area of a rectangle…"
The scene, once common in many countries, is a biting caricature of rote learning, which dispenses with comprehension and reduces the student to a mere receiver. The phrase itself is incorrect: a surface with an area equal to one acre doesn't necessarily have to be a rectangle, much less this one. But the main point is that it's incomprehensible if you don't know the concepts and words: What are furlongs and chains? And what does area have to do with length and width anyway? Thus, the "definition" is just an empty formula, meaningless to those it should instruct.
That's how my classmates and I learned that 2 times 6 equals twelve, 2 times 7 equals fourteen, etc., without knowing what "times" meant. I remember the first time I saw a multiplication table on the blackboard and thought the teacher must be distracted: she was writing the "plus" sign all slanted, calling it "times," and, even more incredibly, getting almost all the calculations wrong! All this with the utmost affection, because the teacher was my mother.
These exaggerations have led, in recent decades, to a significant devaluation of the role of memory in learning mathematics. There is no doubt that the traditional approach was wrong and inefficient, but how far should we go in eliminating memorization from the school environment?
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