Dumb Memorization

I don't know why Indonesian school system is so difficult. Too difficult for its own good, I say. My son complains that his elementary school experience is not fun anymore since moving to Indonesia. He wised up a bit - a sign of adaptation - when he said that he would be more clever than his schoolmates when returning to Canada.

The perverse side of the school system is that once the graduating high school students go to university, the level of difficulty of their education starts to slide downward. This is opposite to what happens in North America where the level of difficulty is almost zero in elementary school and gradually increases to a crushing weight in university.

I was one of Indonesian kids who actually benefited from the Indonesian school system. I was very good in memorization and could cruise through chemistry, geography, or history exams with flying colors. It was great for me, but I realize now that a lot of these memorization drills are really useless. Times changed a lot of things, but not the Indonesian school system, apparently. Who cares if a kid now could memorize the capital of Burkina-Faso when a google search will get that information in 1 second.

The obsession with stressing too much memorization causes much less time spent on learning to think, present ideas coherently, and argue. Students are judged on their memory retention, which will only get worse over time as we age anyway, instead of on their thinking and judgment process. Mathematics becomes arithmetics instead of geometry and pattern recognition. Physics becomes a huge encyclopaedia of formulas instead of wondering about and explaining nature's machinery.

When kids are not trained to think properly, the effect is long lasting. Dumb memorization strategy founded in school does a huge disservice to a nation that really cries to move forward.