Our discussion topic was the effect of memorization in Korean education on the ability to think critically, and my 2 discussion partners (both Korean) had quite different views!
Michelle said that the top universities had a nonsul, or essay, that you had to write to gain entrance and that it required critical thought. As I had no idea of this, we spent our entire time as a pair discussing this and never got to possible solutions! My next partner was Miran, and she had 2 very interesting things to say: firstly that there are hagwons (cram schools) that teach you to answer the nonsul questions, and secondly that she disagreed that memorization was all bad.
Now on the hagwons, Miran's point was basically that you were taught how to beat the test, not think critically. This made me think of Yoshinori Shimuzu's short story, Japanese Entrance Exams for Earnest Young Men: the protagonist, Ichiro, can't pass the Japanese proficiency test necessary to get into a good university and decides to take on a tutor, Tsukisaka, who specializes in helping students ace the exam. Allow me 2 quotes!
Tsukisaka after watching Ichiro struggle with a question on a reading passage:
This kind of problem is a game, Ichiro, and you want to score as many points as you can. It has nothing to do with the essay passage. All you have to do to choose the correct answers is know the rules.
After passing the test and getting into a good university, Ichiro writes a thank-you letter to his mentor, which the narrator describes thus:
His letter was eloquent testimony to the fact that expertise at answering questions on Japanese tests had no relation whatsoever to skill at using the language. If anything, it suggested that being able to answer those questions correctly led to a degeneration in his Japanese skills.
Hyperbole, to be sure, but food for thought!
Miran's second point concerned the necessity for memory work in high school, and I had to agree. In current educational theory there seems to be a tendency to contrast memorization with thought; I consider this a false dichotomy. Thought built on knowledge is potentially much more rigorous, and merely browsing through some information doesn't provide most of us with a solid foundation for critical thought. We need to graze and digest ideas before we can make them work for us.
My geography teacher in high school introduced Bloom's cognitive levels to us in grade 10. Here's a quick look at them:
He explained that in order to apply any of the higher levels, you needed the lower levels; in other words, you had to make sure you knew the material before you were in a position to analyze, synthesize and evaluate data using the theories in the book. In my first semester writing his tests, my grade dropped by 30% and it was a long slog getting them up again, but his teaching principles still make sense to me today.
The counter-argument is of course that critical thinking should be taught concurrently with factual knowledge, but in my opinion that doesn't detract from the necessity of learning the value of information as well as the ability to commit them to memory. Memorizing in itself does not limit thought, but the lack of critical thinking practice does.
So, if our interpretation is correct and memorizing in itself is not the problem, where should we go and look? I believe that this brings us back to English education in Korea, testing, the unreasonable demands tests place on students, and consequently how much study-time is wasted on memorizing vocabulary, expressions and grammar. The point is not to learn to use the language, but to pass the test. Whether or not the government and universities mean for this to happen, it is a direct cause of the proliferation of hagwons and the unhealthy study habits often exhibited by our students. The resulting fatigue and boredom with learning arguably have a greater effect on students' ability to think critically than the physical act of memorization itself.
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