Practice makes permanent in my view

FURTHER to the letters of myself and Tony Morris regarding education then and now and what it is supposed to be about. I frequently used to slip in small items of detail that I thought interesting and pertinent to the topic being studied.

Following one such comment one student asked, “Mr Miller is there anything you don’t know something about?” and I simply replied “Yes many things, but in my day the only aid we had was our on-board calculating device, our own brains, so we had to remember all sorts of things and it was simply a matter of habit, we expected to remember as much as possible of what we were told”.

This mindset was perfectly illustrated by another teacher when we were discussing this: “Yes,” he said, “I remember when we were being introduced to log tables as an aid to arithmetical calculations.

“One student on opening the book said, ‘Sir are we expected to remember all these numbers?’”

I think that says it all; we had no hand held memory sticks in those days, just our very own on-board mobiles and we expected to remember as much as possible of what we were taught.

One of the daftest criticisms of old fashioned education was the word “rote” used by modern educationist. Rote simply means “practice” and we only learn anything at all by the very old, but trusted method. Practice makes permanent.

I used to tell my students that this modern concept “understanding” was meaningless and Miller’s first law of learning was, you cannot understand what you don’t know and to know means to remember.

There is another old fashioned principle: “Use it or lose it” and it applies to our memories.

Jack Miller Orford Avenue Radcliffe-on-trent