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ISSUE 28
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 speaker in so far as students who have learned only facts have learned very little. However, can we human beings give every fact a reasonable explanation is still a question. As a result, requiring students memorize facts only after they have studied the ideas, trends, and concepts that help explain those facts are also unrealistic.
To begin with, just memorize the facts that discovered by other people without thinking it by yourself or trying to understanding it is do no benefit to your study. Peoples cannot get anything useful from this kind of learning, but only exercise their memories. Consider, for example, imaging that there is a person who never have studied chemistry. We can give a periodic table of elements which is considered to be one of the most important and fundamental knowledge in chemistry, and enough time to him/her, and let him/her to recite this table as many as possible. It is highly possible that this person can memorize the name and position of most of the elements on the table, but it is just only a recitation. Without any basis knowledge about chemistry, it is impossible for anybody to understand why these elements arrange like the current order on the table. Nevertheless, if we have already studied chemistry, known the basic ingredient of each element is atom, and been familiar with the inner structure of the atom—it formed by proton and electron, we can clearly understand the regulation of the elements’ arrangement by which we can easily memorize the periodic table of elements. This story tells us studying some concepts about one fact before memorizing it is usually do well for us and can help us understand and memorize the facts.
However, it is too absolute to assert that students should memorize facts only after they have studied the ideas, trends, and concepts that help explain those facts. As we know, although we human beings have made many great and splendid achievements during our 4 million years history, there are still so many things we have not acquired or we still can not explain such as how does our brains work, what is the real appearance in deep oceans, even whether extraterrestrial intelligence exist and where are they? We can only get parts of the facts of these things but cannot acquire a completely interpretation about them which are still mysteries for human beings. Therefore, it is exactly the reason why we should study. One of the aims of education is to foster students’ the spirit of exploration and creativity. Just like what pioneers did, we now learn the facts with questions first, then study, discuss, and make conclusions, and the interpretation and explanation appear finally. For instance, without the facts that an apple falls from a tree and hit Newton who just sit under the tree, how does he found the law of universal gravitation? Therefore, it is unnecessary to emphasize that students must study concept first, learn some facts first sometimes will be a birth of a new concept.
To sum up, students usually should memorize facts after they have studied the ideas, trends, and concepts that help explain those facts in that facts that students cannot comprehend are useless information for them. At the same time, we should also pay attention on the facts we cannot understand and try our best to explain them, because those are the real driving force for social advance. |
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