Rote Culture is a poison to learning
In this Blog, I attempt to introduce the importance of mindfulness in learning and how rote culture hinders the student’s potential.
Mindfulness to learning approaches knowledge with openness to new information and perspectives, and the freedom to consider more than a single solution or a single way to approach a matter. The concept of mindfulness was further studied by Ellen Langer, who introduces seven myths that undermine teaching. These myths are engrained in the rote culture and affect the student’s process of learning. Rote culture sustains the idea that rote memorization, for example, is necessary for education.
Ellen Langer argument is that “what we teach” may be less important than “how we teach it”. In other words, sparking the interest of students may not be all about the subject, because there will undeniably be students who are more interested in the subject than others, but the key lies in the ability of sparking the curiosity of students so that even if they don’t particularly enjoy the subject of the course, they still find it compelling and worthy of their attention.
Nevertheless, some of us do encounter or have experienced in the past the rote culture as a student and sometimes as an instructor as well. The expectation that results are more important to the students and the professors than the process of learning or the progress achieved throughout the learning journey.
The rote culture has shaped everything from performativity, schoolwork, and tests, discipline, obedience to authority, timeliness, from dress code to the code of silence, standardized testing, and the approach to knowledge. Rote culture is vividly criticized for focusing solely on assimilating information without putting any thoughts or reflection to the knowledge. Rote culture encourages passive learning for the simple aim of getting good grades. Grades and standardized tests are the metric to measure student’s production and performance. Rote culture, as stated by Agger and Shelton (2007), is “banishing utopia, theory, and daydreaming as legitimate approaches to knowledge”. Students must memorize and do not learn to theorize, they speculate about the nature of the world and restrict their imagination to dig beneath the surface of things. Positivism grounded in the rote culture put an emphasis on facts and numbers and leaves aside the study of prejudice, class, race, gender studies, and interdisciplinary. Rote culture is a poison to learning.
In response to the rote culture and the pressure it has on students, I think that it is an outstanding ability for instructors to cultivate their student’s imagination and idealism but at the same time, instructors can quickly fall into the pattern of concealing the harsh reality of the job market. Thus, I believe it is of great importance to find a balance between letting students express themselves freely and helping them cope with the reality of high demand and performance, without losing their freedom and creativity along the way.
An amusing anecdote reflecting on the literary meaning of “rote culture” and the word “rote” in particular, in French “rote” means burp. Rote culture metaphorically refers to a culture in which students are forced to swallow all information and knowledge that is already given to them, depriving them of the ability or possibility to reflect on it and digest it well. Indeed, language can be fascinating at times.
References:
- Agger, Ben, and Beth Anne Shelton. 2007. Fast families, virtual children: a critical sociology of families and schooling. Boulder: Paradigm Publishers.
- Langer, Ellen J. 1997. The power of mindful learning. Reading, Mass: Addison-Wesley.