I see what you mean, you have to memorize the very basics. What I meant by route memorization learning culture is a bit different though.
I went to China once and during my visit I met a math teacher. He showed me some of the problems his students could solve.
I was impressed, it were very difficult problems for 11th graders. I couldn't solve some of them myself.
On one problem I asked him how to solve it and he handed me their math book. It was a chapter that had this problem solved in the beginning, and then about 100 questions which were just the same problem with different numbers.
I was hugely disappointed. The students didn't know how to solve a class of problems, just cherry picked problems that they learned by heart.
The problem here is not that you memorize some things, but in math you should understand the problem, and not just be able to input different numbers in an algorithm.
For vast memorization we have Google, for solving algorithms we have computers, for thinking how to solve something we need humans. And this class was trying to educate humans to be computers.
I went to China once and during my visit I met a math teacher. He showed me some of the problems his students could solve.
I was impressed, it were very difficult problems for 11th graders. I couldn't solve some of them myself.
On one problem I asked him how to solve it and he handed me their math book. It was a chapter that had this problem solved in the beginning, and then about 100 questions which were just the same problem with different numbers.
I was hugely disappointed. The students didn't know how to solve a class of problems, just cherry picked problems that they learned by heart.
The problem here is not that you memorize some things, but in math you should understand the problem, and not just be able to input different numbers in an algorithm.
For vast memorization we have Google, for solving algorithms we have computers, for thinking how to solve something we need humans. And this class was trying to educate humans to be computers.