I have been working in education for close to twenty years and I have definitely seen a shift over that time towards less memorization and more understanding concepts.

I heard this from a speaker quite some time ago and here is my reasoning...

Back in the day when I was a kid, the Internet didn't really exist. It might have been around in bits and pieces as part of some government project, but it wasn't as obvious as it is now. When we wanted to learn something, we went to the library or the school and we looked in encyclopedias or we learned from our teachers.

The teachers were the holders of knowledge and they were the conduit through which we gained that knowledge. Mostly through memorization and other things like that.

As the Internet has become more popular and filled with legitimate sources of information, the role of teacher should be shifting. In many cases it is not and the teachers still see themselves as the holders of knowledge.

That really isn't the case anymore. The knowledge is everywhere and it can be accessed whenever you need it simply by logging on to a computer or using your smartphone..

The problem is, there is a lot of crap information out there. False information that people have put on the Internet because there is little to no limitation on what you can post on the Internet.

The speaker I was listening to postulated and I agree that teachers should learn to stop being the holders of knowledge and start to become the facilitators of knowledge.

Like I said, the information is out there in all forms, blogs, whitepapers, youtube videos, webpages, etc. The teachers should start being the ones to teach students how to sift through all of those sources and find the ones that are legitimate and learn how to determine what makes something useful or not.

I think the perfect example of this in regards to your question is the concept of open book tests. How often do teachers not want you having the book open during a test because they see that as cheating? They want you to memorize all the facts and try to regurgitate them in a meaningful way.

That isn't how things work in the real world. If I have a problem I go online and I figure out how to solve it. I don't have to count on my memory to help me remember what a quadratic equation is.

The hope is while you are learning you will absorb some of that information that will be helpful to you in the future. Basic math is a good example of this. Some of those things I think should be memorized. For the most part though I think tests should be open book. These days it is more about "are you able to find the information vs. do you remember the information".

That is why I think concept reading is more important than memorization.

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