Reply to Alexandria Catholic School - no critical thinking??

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Yes, memorizing mundane and intricate facts is absolutely essential. Maybe one day they’ll invent something where kids can easily retrieve esoteric information at will, but until that day, rote memorization must be the focus over analysis and critical thinking.

It’s also a binary choice — rote memorization OR critical thinking. I understand why the school chose the former. [/quote]

I can't think of any good reason for students to memorize mundane or intricate facts like when the Revolutionary War happened, what the Stamp Act was, when the Mexican-American War happened, and who was President during World War II. That's some pretty in-the-weeds stuff, and they could always just look it up on the internet.  [/quote]

Yes, mid conversation or debate they can just say, wait a minute while I look up the basic facts everyone else knows.[/quote]

Yep. It’s also really helpful for college and beyond when you have to do a lot of critical thinking and have absolutely no basis for any of the topics. Nothing like writing a term paper and needing to spend endless hours learning dumb facts first. Or googling furiously during a class discussion because you don’t have any background in the topic yet want to avoid saying something obviously stupid.[/quote]

In the near future people will likely use AI to dig through facts and organize them. The brain-work will be learning to analyze and critically think about the facts. So thank you very much, but I don’t want my kid wasting any of his time learning facts. I want him to polish his critical thinking skills. He’s going to leave everyone else who’s busy sitting through facts in the dust while he’s coming up with next-level analysis.[/quote]

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