Contributed by: filbert Monday, February 16 2009 @ 02:12 PM CST
The headline is good enough for me to post: Rote memorization of historical facts adds to collective cluelessness[*1] :
Brenda M. Trofanenko, a professor of curriculum and instruction in the College of Education, says that teaching history by rote – that is, by having students memorize historical dates and then testing them on how well they can regurgitate that data on a test – is a pedagogical method guaranteed to get students to tune out and add to our collective civic and historical cluelessness.