Rote Learning: Bypassing Thinking by Dr. Renee Fuller

Tony was amazing. He could multiply numbers in the thousands with the speed of a calculating machine. As a small child he had come across a high-number multiplication table which he proceeded to memorize. Was he the brilliant, sophisticated intellect that these feats would indicate? Alas, no. Tony's day to day functioning was in the severely retarded range. However, his rote learning ability when it came to numbers resembled my late computer. But even my newest computer, despite its enhanced abilities, like Tony, is restricted to rote performance: neither are thinking machines.

Similar to Tony and my computers was eight-year old Rhoda. She too had outstanding rote skills. Already by age four she had mastered the alphabet, diphthongs, and her phonemic awareness was outstanding. She aced the various reading-skills tests. It should be noted that for beginning readers these reading-skills tests do not measure reading comprehension. Instead they test a child's phonic and phonemic competence. And that is why it was only later, at age eight, at which time Rhoda could read out loud with ease, that her teacher realized that something was wrong. Although Rhoda made a great reading machine, when asked questions about even the simplest story she had just read her response was a blank and somewhat embarrassed stare. Rhoda was that bane of elementary school teachers who have carefully drilled their students in phonics and phonemic awareness only to find that some of their prize pupils are "word callers"?? Word calling is teacher lingo for reading without comprehension, without awareness what the student is so smoothly reading. Of all the reading problems, this is the most dreaded by experienced teachers. For it is amazingly difficult to turn the rote machine into a thinking human being.

By serendipity one of our teachers found a surprisingly easy way to teach word callers to understand what they read. She accomplished this by teaching them to become teachers of the Ball-Stick-Bird reading system. Of special importance is what her successful intervention demonstrates about how our brain is organized; which is that even in the very young and in the intellectually challenged the brain, in order to make sense out of what has been perceived, organizes it into a story. It is this story-comprehension aspect of neural organization that Ball-Stick-Bird Reading utilizes.

Already in the first lesson the system differs from rote-drill teaching approaches. Although a phonics system, there is no endless drilling of letter names, shapes and sounds. Instead, word building begins immediately with the presentation of the second alphabet letter with the student being shown how to combine the two letters to build a word. By the fourth letter, words are built that create the simple sentences of the evolving story of Vad of Mars who has rockets for feet. From then on, as further letters are presented, more interesting words are built that tell the continuing adventures of Vad of Mars. The developing and hilarious story taps into the language comprehension already present in the very young and the intellectually challenged. This language comprehension capability allows students to anticipate what the next word could be; a technique adults also use to facilitate their reading. By requiring the understanding of what is read from the first lesson on, and by making the student curious as to what will happen next in the story, word calling is avoided and eliminated in the word callers who have been turned into reading teachers.

Contrary to word calling, reading comprehension requires contextual awareness with extensive neurological involvement. In contrast, rote-drill learning by its very nature makes fewer cognitive demands and therefore fewer demands on our brain's integration of previous experience and knowledge. For this reason, because contrary to contextual thinking it requires less intellectual involvement, we tend to assume that rote-drill learning with its memorization of bits of information is the easier learning mode. Our research showed, at least with respect to reading, this is false. We found that even for low IQ students, as long as they have some language comprehension, the immediate immersion into story context makes it possible to teach reading to IQs as low as 20.

Like many "experts"?? I too had been certain that rote-drill learning is less intellectually demanding than contextual learning. It seemed logical that the teaching of the very young or the intellectually challenged should require the simplification of what is to be learned into small units which are then memorized: the paradigm of rote teaching. Which is why when I developed the reading system with its high level of abstraction I had intended it for superior adolescents who had failed in learning to read and tested out as dyslexic or learning disabled. How possibly could the very young or the intellectually challenged learn with a phonics system that uses abstract concepts including story context already in the first lesson? But learn they did. To my astonishment the system was an immediate success with all students including four-year olds and the severely intellectually challenged.

In retrospect the unexpected results don’t seem so surprising. After all language learning, with four-year olds already talking up a storm, appears earlier in development than the ability to rote memorize such simple bits of information as numbers or the alphabet. This despite the fact that contextual language is far more complicated than the simple kinds of rote-drill learning required for these bits of information.

Given the success of four-year olds with complicated language learning, what is it about rote-drill teaching that continues to make it so attractive to educators even when, as in the case of our data, there is contrary evidence? I suspect it is its very simplicity. Drilling students to memorize small bits of disconnected information (rote teaching) doesn't require thinking on part of either the teacher or the students. Besides it allows you, the teacher, to become an authority figure who cannot easily be questioned. You can relax in the sense that you donâ??t have to be vigilant, worrying what your students will think of next. You can run on automatic, at least for a while. Rote-drill teaching also has the additional attraction that its cognitive simplicity lends itself to indoctrination; something that many a department of Education encourages. When the indoctrinated in turn become teachers they tend to repeat the process with their own students, even when the methodology used produces numerous failures, even disasters.

These factors may explain why historically rote teaching has been so entrenched. It seems reasonable to assume that it represents the earliest and the original teaching method. Among the first to break with the rote tradition were Greek scholars like Aristotle, the teacher, and his pupil Plato. The Greek concept of learning through questioning, which was taken up by the Egyptians and then the Romans, resulted in a spectacular knowledge explosion in mathematics, the sciences, architecture and philosophy. The Mediterranean basin (what was the then Western world) had become the hub of a remarkable human awakening.
When the "western world"?? began to break apart, its symbols of intellectual progress, the university and library in Alexandria, were torched. Thereafter the questioning approach to teaching and learning all but disappeared. With learning restricted primarily to rote-drill memorization as taught in the monasteries there was a dramatic decline both in reading and intellectual production. It was the rediscovery of the Greek philosophers, among them Plato and Aristotle, which actualized the Renaissance. With it came an intellectual reawakening that created the Western world we know today. But the vestiges of the medieval rote-drill teaching style with its memory drills are still with us.

The deleterious effects of rote teaching are apparent not just with children like Rhoda. There are other types of casualties of the rote-memorization approach. For example there was Mike with his superior IQ. No, Mike did not have a neurological defect. The defect was a function of what rote instruction did to him. For unfortunately Mike, in addition to having a superior IQ also had something close to a photographic memory combined with remarkable memorization ability. So from first grade on he carefully memorized what his teachers taught, something he continued to do all the way through graduate school. For these memory feats Mike was rewarded with outstanding exam scores, including on the SAT and the Graduate Record Exam.

So what went wrong in Mike's education? It was that he was never intellectually challenged. He had progressed from simple rote-drill memorization of tiny bits of information to memorizing larger chunks. In this second stage of rote learning he successfully memorized complete stories. Mike, who had the endowment to become an outstanding abstract thinker, to be a major contributor to knowledge, found no need for the work required for genuine thinking and questioning. It had never been necessary. If anything he was discouraged from indulging in such pleasures. As a result, what could have been a highly original mind was instead one that spouted back other people's ideas and findings, albeit with impressive accuracy and detail. Mike was an intellectual casualty of the rote-memorize teaching methods that are still prevalent in most schools, even in many colleges and graduate schools.

What happens to children whose rote memory abilities are the opposite of Mike's, the ones who find it difficult to memorize even a simple poem, the ones whose parents keep insisting that they are really bright even though the school maintains otherwise? These children frequently are the late talkers. When other children are already talking in sentences they produce only a few isolated words. It is not unusual for these late talkers to be taken to the pediatrician for evaluation â?? oftentimes, like Einstein, to be labeled retarded. But eventually, after the evaluators are certain that here is a defective child, the child, from one day to the next, converses in sophisticated sentences. The parents, who understandably had been labeled defensive, had indeed been right that their youngster was truly very bright.
How is it possible for a child to have almost no language and then quite suddenly be able to talk fluently? Apparently the brain organization of such children requires the extensive collection of data before, at a critical point, these data are integrated into a coherent whole. In the case of the late talkers this would explain why the intermediate stage of language production is skipped and why at the critical point there is a sudden production of advanced language. Although penalized in most schools, some of these poor rote-drill memorizers have a potentially important intellectual advantage. Because their brain requires extensive data to make sense of the world and/or the logic of a situation they gain important practice in abstract thought. This would explain why some of the defective rote-drill memorizers become our great intellectual contributors. These are the children who are capable of doing what even my latest computer cannot; they can reason in terms of implications, of abstraction. They are thinking organisms. Their presumed defect is the very reason they have been able to avoid the pitfalls that resulted from Mike's photographic and superior memorization abilities.

The danger of rote teaching is that it allows, even encourages, us to avoid having to think. Because it can be so comfortable, rote-drill instruction subtly undermines the importance of reasoning not only for the students but also for the teacher - even when that was not the intent. But there is another possible danger created by rote teaching. It is its indoctrination potential. Note: rote teaching and indoctrination have a linked history. If you want to indoctrinate you do not want questioning. Therefore you teach using the rote memorization approach. The results of rote teaching with the intent to indoctrinate can range from bland and stupid to truly terrifying.

The bland if not stupid type of indoctrination includes everything from dutifully repetitious school or sports loyalty dicta to the automatic phrases to be used on certain occasions. More serious are the unsuccessful teaching techniques with which students in departments of Education are frequently indoctrinated. At the truly terrifying extreme is the indoctrination of children and even adults to become suicide bombers. In all of these cases there is verbal rote memorization of the actions that are to be carried out. They have in common that their aim is to bypass thinking. In the case of the suicide bombers the awful consequences of shutting out thinking are all too apparent. The consequence of blanking out the questioning that the Greek philosophers considered so important can be truly ghastly.
It has long ceased to make sense to ask children to memorize disconnected bits of information. Even the multiplication table can be taught without using the rote-drill method. Catherine Stern in her CHILDREN DISCOVER ARITHMETIC showed how this can be done. As for factual information, the understanding of which is an essential part of true education; there are dictionaries, almanacs and now computers that are readily accessible. This factual information our brain can organize and integrate into meaningful mathematical, scientific or historical stories. It is these stories, be they abstract, involved or simple, which can inform us what the facts mean. And thus facts, instead of being disconnected bits of information become knowledgeable information for us to think with.

So why are we still doing it, why are we passing on the failing rote-drill techniques from one generation to the next? We have wonderfully exciting alternative techniques that teach and encourage thinking, methods that bypass rote-drill technologies with their all too obvious drawbacks. The questioning taught by Greek philosophers is what our schools should be encouraging. Instead they frequently reward and even mandate testing for superior rote performance, thereby taking the fascination and excitement out of learning, and limiting intellectual development. By finally breaking with the rote tradition we will teach and encourage our children to more fully use their human intelligence. It is the full use of that intelligence which will determine who we can and will become as humans.

About the author:
Dr. Renee Fuller is a developmental psychologist and author of the Ball-Stick-Bird reading program. Read her many articles on her web site or for information about her services: http://www.ballstickbird.com