In Defense of Rote Memorization

I wasn’t supposed to write an entire essay on The Social Network. I wanted to analyze that film for this essay, but when my commentary ballooned into twenty-one hundred words, I realized the two pieces should exist separately. And so, dear readers, to the point at hand…

I’ve heard it argued, both on the internet and in real life, that rote memorization is an outdated pedagogy now that we all have supercomputers in our pockets. This argument has come from both do-gooder liberal professors who think grades are a form of white supremacy and lazy freshmen who don’t understand why I’m making them memorize every term from Building Great Sentences: Exploring the Writer’s Craft by Brooks Landon.

Well. I am certainly not disputing that we all have supercomputers in our pockets.

But how did I come to understand The Social Network? By my count, I used:

1. Verbal irony

2. “Isn’t It Ironic?” by Alanis Morissette

3. Dramatic irony

4. Alfred Hitchcock’s definition of “suspense”

5. Tragic irony

6. The story of Oedipus

7. Bugs Bunny saying “Ain’t I a stinker?”

8. Rube Goldberg machines

9. The hero’s journey

10. Inferiority complexes

11. “The jet set,” “the in crowd,” “WASPs,” and “old money / new money”

12. Citizen Kane

13. “Baby You’re a Rich Man” by The Beatles

As I ease into my forties, I feel two things happening to my brain. On the one hand, there is the almost visceral sensation of my memory degrading. New facts are harder to pick up; old facts are harder to retain. In an essay on the importance of rote memorization, I have to admit, it’s great having a supercomputer in my pocket. But on the other hand, I feel this wonderful… Wait. Let me tell you a story.

I was learning to catch fly balls. My dad told me to put my mitt in front of my face and watch the ball arc all the way down till I caught it. I told him I saw pros catch the ball down at their side all the time. His response has stayed with me for thirty years: “If you go pro, you can catch it however you want.”

Well, I never went pro at baseball (I once successfully bunted down the third base line and was so shocked by my success I forgot to run to first), but I went pro at loving art. Novels and poems and paintings and sculptures. Movies and plays and cooking and dance. The Simpsons, seasons one through eleven, and a lot of other television too. Music, of course. (I don’t play any instrument well, but I have fun playing piano, drums, and guitar decently.) Bonsai trees. Video games. Gertrude Stein, Stephen King. High brow, low brow. I love it all. I don’t consume it uncritically, and there are individual works that leave me flat, but as a general experience, I love it all.

And I can feel thirty years of that love paying off, as everything I have ever consumed connects in weird, wonderful ways: a happy little rat’s nest of experience hidden in my head. Consequently, even as my brain falls apart from drinking and depression and age, when I watch The Social Network I think of inferiority complexes and the story of Oedipus and tragic irony, and the movie becomes richer and sadder as a result. Poor, broken, self-sabotaging Mark Zuckerberg. He could get what he wants if only he didn’t want it.

This essay is titled “In Defense of Rote Memorization.” Here is my defense.

A young person sitting down to watch The Social Network for the first time does indeed have a supercomputer in their pocket which contains all human knowledge, a miraculous search function, and an LLM to translate everything into easily digestible prose. Hold a trivia contest between a nineteen-year-old with an iPhone and a hundred experts, and the nineteen-year-old will win every time.

But I hope—I sincerely do—that before the incredible first scene begins, that young person decides to pause the movie, pull out their phone, and go to Wikipedia. I hope, though they’ve never heard of it, they type the phrase “tragic irony” into the search bar. I hope they take five minutes to read about the concept. Then, and only then, I hope they enjoy the movie.

They’ve got all of human knowledge in their pocket. I hope they take the time to transfer one small part of that knowledge into their head. But I’m not optimistic they will.