Executive summary: Rote and memorization are good habits that should be encouraged for long-term learning and personal growth.
The trouble with approaching this question is that it may take us near (or directly through) a veritable bees’ nest at the psycho-political edge of educational theory! I’m going to side-step the semantic hornets and answer as practically as I know how, from experience and from the heart. You’re a learner, you were born with a brain, you want to use your resources to the full when you learn, and your brain is equipped with memory. Of course you should use it!
Naturally, it would be silly to be “all RAM and no CPU”, so one wonders if there’s a balance to be found between information retention and processing power, and, if so, how does this balance promote “better” learning?
Don’t let anyone tell you it’s bad
to commit things
to memory
Is it ever useful to “learn” something by heart? I’d argue that it often can be. Our minds work in mysterious ways: how often has a trivial fact risen, unbidden, in your awareness, and enriched a conversation you were having? The spontaneity of memory can fuel wonderful, divergent inputs to our thought processes. We don’t know why (perhaps we never will).
I’ve learned never to disparage a sudden memory. Appropriate memories can increase the available options in decision-making, and often characterize active, zany, parallelistic thinking. Random recall may be what spurs the ground-breaking ideas and surprising connections that are hallmarks of modern thought leaders.
…your brain is equipped with memory. Of course you should use it!
I have vivid memories of situations, places, events and people, along with physical principles, fragments of songs, learned facts and rudimentary rules, that offer me an abundance of apparent truths and heuristic connections. What is remarkable is that these memorized elements haven’t simply lain unprocessed over 50-60 years; they seem to have formed an active substrate, and a subliminal habit of recall and reprocessing has empowered me to learn more from them. In other words, my understanding grows in the light of my own memories.
So, how does one acquire these memories? Well, of course, many memories are stored without much effort (learning at its best!) But occasionally you’ll encounter an idea, maybe enshrined in an image or wrapped in some words, which you find beautiful at the time. Perhaps your instinct will be to commit this to memory. It’s important to point out that you shouldn’t do this mindlessly, but equally that it’s ok to memorize something you don’t fully understand (do we fully understand anything, after all?) I feel that it’s just fine to remember something that I like and that I want to understand more deeply; in time it may settle and grow in my mind.
As I write this paragraph, I am sitting on a bench in late afternoon sunshine, looking out over a lake, and I’ve suddenly recalled some lines of Tennyson:
I am a part of all that I have met;
Yet all experience is an arch wherethro’
Gleams that untravell’d world whose margin fades
For ever and forever when I move.
The bottom line: Don’t let anyone tell you it’s bad to commit things to memory. Go ahead and try it for yourself: learn a Shakespeare soliloquy, memorize 100 digits of π, recite the US presidents in reverse order, if you want to. Then (give it time) make up your own mind whether it’s helpful or not.