“Stop trying to remember and start trying to think.”
-Helen Childs Boyden
What good is memorized information if we don’t know when to apply it? Many Deerfield students are required to commit to memory seemingly endless lists of vocabulary words, world capitals and science principles. But this arbitrary data, a staple of the classic high school experience, does not give us the edge we need out there in the “real world.”
We at The Scroll do not advocate eliminating memorization from all curricula, but instead believe that Deerfield should prioritize logical deduction, critical thinking and problem-solving over mere memorization. While some memorized elements are valuable, we encourage teachers to integrate this long-standing, basic learning method with more cutting-edge approaches.
To be fair, a substantial amount of hands-on, reasoning-oriented learning already occurs at the Academy, but stressing it even more as a factor that sets Deerfield apart from the crowd could help us in the increasingly competitive years to come. We students should graduate as thinkers, not reciters.