Rote Learning is a kind of a technique in which learner instead of understanding the material will focus on to memorize it by repeating it over and over again till a point one able to store the information in the brain for short period of time. Their main objective is to obtain short term success while ignoring the long term gain.

Rote learning is a part of our education system and it is heavily used in primary and secondary education, teacher rely on rote learning to teach children quicker while student uses rote learning to pass the test or exam as our education system is all about who gets the most marks rather than knowledge so if student gets the desired marks both student and teacher wins and ultimately the school wins so it’s a win-win situation for all  but it comes at a cost of children’s future  and  no-body has focused on this issue.

Student pass the school or even college with a very little knowledge and questioned the education system after failure in life due to this some school are now understanding that they need to change way of learning some  school like  the  boarding school in Dehradun and specially  Girl Boarding School of Dehradun came forward  to change the way of teaching and learning by upgrading the methodology of teaching using technology to help student in learning process.  But before we all criticize old rote learning technique let’s take a deep look at it.

How Rote learning works

In Rote learning human brain works as a storage platform which store information for short term so when that task is finished it automatically start deleting the information he has gathered earlier  so it works actually  the same way as you and I listen to a song over and over again and it stuck in our head and after some time we able to remember the lyrics of the song by heart but after a period of time let”s say 5-10 years when you stop listening to that particular song you will notice that you started to forget  the lyrics of that song.

Is Rote learning bad ?

Rote learning technique do have some draw backs  like:

• Many students who used this techniques have found to have a Short term memory  as they trained their brain to learn everything for a short period of time.
• Whatever you learn using this technique it won’t be stored in for a long period of time . (Don’t believe me try remember what you have learned in class 5 , 6, 7 ,8 I bet you won’t remember anything because our brain is used to this techniques and it can”t store information for a long term).
• Lack of knowledge as when student study using this technique one is not educating themselves they are just remembering information for a small period of time and this will result lack of knowledge.
• No connection in past and present knowledge as rote learning is based on short term learning so the student unable to remember most of the thing he learn in the past and one can”t use the old knowledge to help him gain new knowledge
• Only works in primary education but won’t help in secondary education where complex material makes it too  hard for the student to memorize it.

Some believe  Rote learning is actually helpful

We all know by now that rote learning is bad and schools are changing the way  of study to minimize rote learning but researchers in a new study have found that Rote learning is actually helpful for the kids in primary education as the knowledge is comparatively easy in primary education so the teacher uses this technique to make children learn faster remember how teacher used to make kids repeat the tables over and over again till they learn by heart.

We all know school give preference to marks than knowledge so students are using this technique of rote learning to get the marks and they are not wrong for doing that until and unless school changes there way of teaching and examining children student will depend on rote learning.

Futute of Rote Learning

Rote learning is old technique and it has some flaws but still it is best  technique to teach small children as they learn quickly and  they remember it for the rest of their life just like how we remember ABCD . Once children moved to secondary education  no doubt  they can’t rely on rote learning as they need to use the understanding and reasoning techniques to gain knowledge which will be them for a long term that’s why schools like Boarding school of Dehradun and  mainly Girls  Boarding school of Dehradun  have started to use the advance teaching technologies which uses reasoning to make children understand faster and better and it look like more school will adapt this way of teaching in the near future.