The idea of school and exams is they teach you information that you need to understand and also remember. Memory is used every day anyway to do lots of things like shopping or at work someone might ask you to do something for them later which you need to remember.
I heard Harry lorayne (A American memory training specialist) speak a bit about it in an interview on YouTube. He spoke to the American educational system about teaching High School students memory techniques in schools and he said in his own words it was covered in red tape. He spoke to a teacher and they said we use doing and concept to teach students not memory, he then said to the teacher when you teach students the Periodic table’s symbols and meanings and test them on it how do they know the answers and the teacher still did not agree it was important.
The only reason I can think of is it could be seen as cheating to memorise answers but other than that I don’t know why it’s not even mentioned.
The reason why memory techniques aren’t taught is primarily based on the assumption that memorizing things will prevent people from thinking independently. Personally, I’d say that’s a bunch of hogwash, the memorization step is basically busy work as it’s the result that’s of interest.
Probably another reason is that it would require that tests be a bit more involved than filing in names and dates.
School are designed to teach you to show up at a particular hour, leave at a particular hour and do what you’re told during the hours in-between. It’s a nearly-ancient technology of compliance mostly invented by 18th century “enlightenment” seekers who needed to fill factories with workers.
Before schools, it was extremely difficult to get people to work who could tend their fields and hunt for food during the spring and summer, so following the winter, most workers would just disappear. Those who showed up were usually drunk.
The solution?
Get 'em while they’re wrong and train them to behave in accordance with social norms that produce a particular result (namely goods from factories that can be sold back to the laborers).
Muscle memory and Pavlovian conditioning at the cognitive level is all you need in order to ensure that the masses know when to show up, when to leave and what to do during the hours in-between. It serves the system very little to have people with exceptional memories demonstrating their knowledge left-right-and-center.
However, conspiracy theory left aside, the fact remains that schools do often teach memory techniques of one sort or another. What seems to be lacking is anything interesting to remember as young people are stuffed full of antiquated grammar rules (yes, they still teach the semi-colon!) and all sorts of material that one would rather forget than memorize.
I think that with more self-directed learning options combined with memory techniques (especially location-based memory techniques), we would see an amazing surge in the amounts of strategical thinkers emerging from our schools, ready to take the world by Mnemonic Storm.
Metivier, totally agree… But I don’t think it’s a “conspiracy theory” so much as a fact of human nature: People at large don’t like to question established systems. The current school system is an industrial-era creation, just like 9-5 corporate jobs. Those systems worked for their time, but it’s time to move on now.
If people can get a 40-hour workweek done in 4 hours, and if students can learn everything they need for high school in the space of 2 weeks, then why not? That’s exactly how I live my life, and I think everyone else should aspire to do the same.