Rethinking the Bad Rap of Rote

It might be time to rethink how we see rote learning in education. Memorization and repetition often get a bad rap, especially since critical thinking is usually the star of the show. As we climb the academic and career ladder, and as we rightly focus on the ability of AI to recall anything for us in seconds, memorization logically takes a back seat. But here's why I think it has a worthy place in the future:

Automaticity. Research shows that being able to do things or recall information without even thinking about it is one of the hallmarks of an expert. Benjamin Bloom once described automaticity as "the hands and feet of genius." He called it "overtraining," practicing well beyond just being good at something, and said that this is what made people truly great at something. Overtraining is not a great term to use today, since it has negative consequences in both fitness and machine learning. But the human brain does gain something significant by going beyond the basic requirements of understanding, aiming instead at instant recall. When you know the basics cold, your brain can focus on the more nuance.

An obvious example is driving. When you drove on the highway for the first time, you were focused exclusively on staying in your lane and alive. But after a while, you naturally began thinking about the best route for avoiding traffic, and then, what's in store at your next meeting. That's expertise in play, built on automaticity.

A colleague of mine started at a new firm and was asked to memorize client presentations word for word. He is a lawyer, and knows how to think on his feet. At first he was skeptical, but in the process of memorizing he came across terms and ideas he knew he needed to understand better. He very quickly became fluent in a legal arena that was new to him. Memorization gave him a base, a head start on the path to becoming an expert. Rote learning sped up his career.

I led the development of training for a new healthcare-related business where entry-level employees needed to get comfortable talking to customers. Even though they were paid the equivalent of entry-level food service employees, they were dealing with people's nutritional health and needed to get it right. So we came up with five "mantras" – short, simple statements they could repeat to customers about the brand promise, the nutrition, the process, the pricing, and the product. Each mantra had two "power phrases" that added extra context. Memorization of a one-page cheat sheet then became a quick path to effectiveness on the job. And it also gave them foundational categories for all their subsequent training, which was helpful because categorization is another hallmark of expertise.

And then there's Artificial Intelligence, which is also built on repetition. These systems develop their cognitive capabilities through exposure to millions of examples, processing operations repeatedly while engineers evaluate outcomes and refine algorithms. Neural networks typically require training on massive datasets, performing millions upon millions, even billions of iterations to learn effectively. This process, teaching machines through extensive repetition, exactly parallels how humans develop expertise.

Sometimes, being innovative is about using old ideas in new ways. With so many e-learning tools to help with memorization and repetition, maybe we should add to our higher-level focus some of the old methods.