Forget about it

School is so focused on cramming kids' heads full of information that we often lose sight of one important fact -- forgetting is just as important as remembering.

This Wall Street Journal story points out that if we want our minds to adapt and learn efficiently, we need to let some things go.

"We focus so much on memory that forgetting has been maligned," Gayatri Devi, a neuro-psychiatrist and memory expert in New York City, told the Journal. "But if you didn't forget, you'd recall all kinds of extraneous information from your life that would drown you in a sea of inefficiency."

Not to belabor the point, but when was the last time we needed to expand upon the symbolic meaning of color blue in The Great Gatsby or calculate vector equations? Just a thought for a day when most kids are out of school and, presumably, not studying.

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Comments

[John]

Do you remember what it was like before you could read? I contend that there were things that you had to learn before you could read that were fundamental to your learning to read. I never appreciated learning the "Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner," when I was 14, but, now that I am older I appreciate having been taught both what the poem meant as well how to analyze the written word. And I still remember my Freshman English teacher, Mrs. Roach.