I would be grateful if you could tell me what you think about my essay. I have puposefully left in the mistakes that I couldn't manage to correct in time.
"Students should memorize facts only after they have studied the ideas, trends, and concepts that help explain those facts. Students who have learned only facts have learned very little."
I agree with the idea that students shouldn't just memorize facts but should also learn about the ideas, trends and concepts underlying these facts. In an era where science thrives on applications of existing knowlegde, the value of theory is neglected and underestimated. Yet a society cannot just rely on learners that don't understand what they are learning.
First studying the ideas trends and concepts behind the facts in the most natural way for a learner to fully understand a fact. In order to meake this argument more cogent let's imagine that we could travel in time and bring a perhistoric man to our age. Let's further assume that we present him a television. The prehistoric man would probably be dazzled in seeing the fact that a small box can contain so much and speak for itself. In order to explain to the prehistoric man the television one would have not only to explain electricity and telecommunication, but also concepts such as culture, drama and acting. The prehistoric man would certainly suffer a nervous breakdown because presenting him a fact so unimaginable for him would make him feel extremely stupid and depressed. If the prehistoric man knew everything required to understand the workings of a television he would have perhaps be a little amazed at first, the way we are when a new gadget hits the market, but that's as far as his astonishment would go. This should make clearer the fact that most pieces of knowledge are dependent on other pieces of knowledge without which they might seem absurd or incomprehensible.
To make matters worse, a student that has memorized a fact is much more susceptible in forgeting it after a specific amount of time. On the other hand a student who knows the principles behind a fact can also forget the fact at a later time, but, in contrast to the rote learner, such a student can probably derive the fact based on the known principles. All this is motivated by my experience with mathematics. Mathematics can be studied in many ways the less fruitful of which is for a student to try to memorize all the theorems and lemmas in a book. But even in specific areas of mathematics there are virtually millions of theorems and one cannot possible learn every one of them. Instead the best practice I have found is to understand the basic ideas and concepts that a certain mathematical formulation tries to model. After all, mathematics try to model real world problems and phenomena. If a student knows what phenomenon a specific equation models, it will be possible to derive a similar result for a similar phenomenon in another setting. A student that has just learned to solve this equation is less likely to apply this knowlegde in a different setting.
Finally a last point that supports my argument is that in my university and in all universities that I know of, the truly most honorable scientists, are the ones who teach the most fundamental things. These people are always the advocates of the opinion that learings the underlying ideas and concepts should always be a prerequisite for learning the facts. The academic status of those people indicates the correctness of their view.
Even though one could live with knowing just the facts, if his job is more applied than someone else's, a truly remarkable student and scientist is the one who delves into the details and is curious to see what is under the hood. Thus, to sum up, students shouldn't merely memorize facts because that way their knowlegde becomes limited and sterile. For a scientist there is no other way than knowing every detail that underlies a fact.
