Education reform should start in the classroom, with the relationship between teacher and pupil. In this vein, high school math teacher Ben Orlin’s recent Atlantic piece “When Memorization Gets in the ...

Memorizing facts is generally seen as less important than developing skills like critical thinking. In fact, though, having information stored in your memory is what enables you to think critically.

In my 29 years of teaching, I have often reflected on the balance between memorization and understanding. I recall one conversation where a math teacher shared the belief that “memorization no longer ...

The idea of rote memorization is bound to tick some people off, which makes for nice discussion and debate. In all the very legitimate conversation about critical thinking, problem-solving, analysis, ...

I once caught an 11th-grader who snuck a cheat sheet into the final exam. At first, he tried to shuffle it under some scratch paper. When I cornered him, he shifted tactics. "It's my page of equations ...

Mathematics education in the United States puts far too much emphasis on memorization, says Stanford math education professor Jo Boaler. And that ultimately leads students to both misunderstand and ...

Oaklander is a senior editor at TIME. Oaklander is a senior editor at TIME. Some skills you don’t need past graduation: geometry, cursive, the ability to dissect a frog. But memorization is not one of ...

Ask a student to memorize a formula, and AI can do it faster. But ask them to apply it to a real-world problem, and that’s where the future of rigor lies. For decades, rigor in advanced coursework ...

When engineers build AI language models like GPT-5 from training data, at least two major processing features emerge: memorization (reciting exact text they’ve seen before, like famous quotes or ...