There's a place for rote memorization

Facts are truer than theories

I love facts. You know how periodically teachers are like, "We don't teach kids facts, we teach them how to think!" I'm like...but you teach them some facts too right? I mean where are kids gonna learn facts unless someone teaches them!

A while back I read Stefan Zweig's memoir about growing up in the Austro-Hungarian Empire (The World Of Yesterday). Fin de siecle Vienna was the absolute most cultured place on Earth. In arts, literature, the humanities, and the social sciences, it absolutely dominated. It didn't even do too poorly in the natural sciences! The two most famous novels about Vienna in the pre-war period, Radetzky March (Joseph Roth) and Man Without Qualities (Robert Musil), tell a very similar story: this is a fertile, inventive hot-house world that is slowly decaying, as exemplified by its monarch, the aging Franz Joseph, who is physically decrepit and yet remains energetic and ambitious. Every institution in the Empire is rotten, but in a curiously life-giving way, where its very rottenness and lack of function allows numerous smaller beings to flourish and nourish themselves.

The educational system is a perfect example. It's all rote memorization. Zweig is like,

if I am to be honest, the entire period of my schooling was nothing other than a constant and wearisome boredom, accompanied year after year by an increased impatience to escape from this treadmill. I cannot recall ever having been either “joyous” or “blissful” during that monotonous, heartless, and lifeless schooling which thoroughly spoiled the best and freest period of our existence.

He says that this is purposeful: "Austria was an old State, dominated by an aged Emperor, ruled by old Ministers, a State without ambition, which hoped to preserve itself unharmed in the European domain solely by opposing all radical changes. Young people, who always instinctively desire rapid and radical changes, were therefore considered a doubtful element which was to be held down or kept inactive for as long a time as possible...." (See I wasn't joking about how they're constantly using old Emperor CJ as a symbol).

But then he notices something strange. At about the age of 14 or 15, suddenly everyone in his class wakes up to the majesty of the city outside. Whereas they see nothing interesting in school, outside, on every street or cafe, they find a thousand amusements, and suddenly all his acquaintances are all awakened, in their hundreds, to the world of art:

I worry this is going to just turn into a summary of The World of Yesterday, which is really one of the finest memoirs I've ever read. But I think what's more fascinating is that Zweig lambastes the aged, schlerotic quality of the society in which he lives, but never seems to wonder, hey, maybe there's some connection here! Maybe our schooling belittles us and treats us like kids, and it creates that very desire for overcoming the past and proving ourselves that allows us to produce great art.

Which makes you wonder about the opposite? What if there was a form of schooling that attempted to treat kids like adults? Attempted to respect their opinions, to give them full autonomy in manner and dress and mores, and to teach them "how to think". Isn't it possible that the result would be a retreat from adulthood? That the kids would abandon mature art and literature, abandon ambition, and retreat into the childish and small?

I don't doubt that the school Zweig went to was fully as sinister and stupid as he claimed, but I think there's also something sinister about a school that grades you on your "creativity" or "independent-mindedness". Because we know that creativity is dangerous. Which means any truly creative person probably isn't going to please their teachers--and that in turn means the creative person will get poor creativity scores in the creativity portion of the curriculum--because the teacher, in grading creativity, is grading merely the simulation of creativity. This means that in teaching creativity, they are truly teaching its opposite: how to conform.

But in Zweig's school, where they openly taught conformity and conservatism, the education was at least pure. You might learn a trivial mishmash of names and dates and scientific principles and Latin words, but at least you truly did learn those things. The school didn't debase independent-thinking, because it didn't teach it in the first place.

Moreover, while the modern school is quite bad at teaching you to make smart thoughts, the 19th-century atelier or academy was quite good at teaching you to recite dumb facts. Say what you want about Harvard forcing kids to memorize twenty chapters of Gibbon, you could be certain that every Harvard graduate at least knew a bunch of facts about the Roman Empire by the time they graduated! Of course, this can be overstated--the education at Harvard and the Oxbridge colleges appears, in most times, to have been quite lazy and pro-forma, and most graduates left school without learning a single thing.¹

I went to a school much closer to Zweig's alma mater than to a typical 21st century American high school. I mean...I don't want to overstate the case: our teachers prided themselves on teaching us how to think, obviously. But we also had a class called The Humanities where every tenth grader looked at slides of famous paintings and got tested on whether they could recite the name and painter. We had seven years of Latin, where every day we did translations first of Cicero (7th grade), Catullus (8th grade), Vergil (9th grade), and Ovid (10th grade). I was joking to a parent once that I loved Catholic school—I still remember all the random stuff they taught me, like that the Battle of Hastings was fought in 1066. They were like wow I don't think I know what the Battle of Hastings was. I was horrified! How can you not know about the Battle of Hastings? Or how can you not know about the switch in time that saved nine? Or about the Whiskey Rebellion? Or about any of the thousand and one other little factoids they made us learn?

Personally, I wasn't a great studier. I did okay, but what I did to prepare for school wasn't really studying. I would just sit down and do the reading, and then...I'd be done. That's all. I didn't make notes. I didn't reread. I didn't try to remember. Sometimes before a test I'd read through the chapters again, but that was it. And honestly it was kind of enjoyable. To this day, I rather enjoy reading textbooks. I recently read the first four volumes of the History of Imperial China--just for a little refresher course. Right now I'm reading the thirteenth volume of the Oxford History of England, and it's frankly one of the best books I've ever read. I am learning so much! Like, I've never really understood the 19th century party system in Britain. I always want the tory to be the Republican and the whig to be the Democratic, bwut the strange thing is that the Whig party was much more aristocratic in outlook and composition than the tories were. The Tory party was the party of the university, the church, the military, and the large farmer, but the Whig was the party of the truly huge noble magnate--which is exactly why it was so marginal in the late 19th century. Because if you're just the party of the uberwealthy, and the other party is the party of the middle-class, and poor people aren't allowed to vote, then who's gonna vote for you? You might in some notional sense be the party of the poorer person, but they can't really vote. Whereas when it comes to any clash of real material interests, you're basically the guy everybody else hates.

As conservatives are fond of bringing up, this clash between the the magnate and the small-scale owner of property is not at all uncommon in history. Julius Caesar, champion of the people, was became extremely wealthy through his conquests, while he was opposed by the Senatorial class, who felt their traditional prerogatives declining. In Florence, the struggle was between the old landed interests, the Magnati, and the rich merchant class, the Populo Grosso, with the latter allying itself with the poorer artisans, the Populo Minusso, for influence. In Britain, the King had operated for years to diminish the power of the nobility on the grounds of helping the poor tenant. In Tang Dynasty China, the conflict was between the old noble houses of Guanzhong, which predated the Emperor's family and considered themselves superior to it, and the new noble houses of Guangzhu, who sought entrance to official-dom and sought to make money by allying themselves with state power. Marx himself was obsessed by the struggle between the big bourgeoisie and the little bourgeoisie--he felt that revolution could only come once the former defeated the latter, and he thought that the victory of Louis Philippe in the Revolution of 1830 represented precisely such a defeat.

So yes, what I'm learning about in this book is an old pattern. And I could just as easily have been taught about the pattern itself rather than the facts.

But it's not the only pattern. Because...if I was just taught, oh, throughout history, there is a large landed interest and a small landed interest, and they tend to fight, then I’d also be learning something that’s a bit wrong! Because there's also lots of conflicts that don't fit that example. Look at the 14th-century peasant revolts. Those are in no way the revolt of either a large or a small landed interest. In Florence, the merchants and guilds tried to harness the population of lesser artisans and use them to pressure the government, but the artisans broke free in the revolt of the Ciompi and took control of the city for a few years there! Or take the Reign of Terror in the French Revolution. It's impossible to find a class basis for this conflict, which was largely between two factions of prosperous middle-class lawyers, and which seems to have occurred over more-or-less ideological grounds. The same is true of the Stalinist Great Purges, where Stalin destroyed his own largely loyal official-dom. It's utterly baffling: it doesn't fit any materialist view of history. Nor is it inevitable, even for totalitarian societies: Hitler's largest purge of his own ranks was the Night of Long Knives--a targeted attack on the leadership of his paramilitary, the SA. He never undertook mass reprisals against the Nazi rank-and-file membership. Stalin would've sent every member of the SA to the camps (as he did, for instance, with the partisan forces that survived WWII). Hitler didn't do that.

We don't have theories to describe some of these things. There is a glorious specificity to history that I think is rich and is worth knowing. Without facts, all we have are theories, and if all we have is theories, then we will inevitably attempt to fit each circumstance to some preconceived dogma. Yes, it's good to "learn how to think", but too often our thoughts are, at their best, just vague generalities, while all that much-despised rote knowledge is actually a set of concrete specificities.

1. Edward Gibbon here complains that his second tutor at Oxford simply never bothered to teach him a single thing: “Dr—- well remembered that he had a salary to receive, and only forgot that he had a duty to perform. Instead of guiding the studies, and watching over the behaviour of his disciple, I was never summoned to attend even the ceremony of a lecture; and, excepting one voluntary visit to his rooms, during the eight months of his titular office, the tutor and pupil lived in the same college as strangers to each other.”