In contemporary education, memory has undergone a quiet relegation. Once central to learning, it is now often dismissed as rote or mechanical. Pedagogical discourse privileges critical thinking, creativity, and problem-solving — all valuable aims — but this shift has inadvertently pushed memory to the margins. The result is an impoverished understanding of how knowledge, emotion, and experience intertwine in the act of learning.
From the perspective of classical learning traditions, memory was never passive. It was understood as an active faculty — a means to internalize, transform, and reimagine knowledge. In Vedic pedagogy, for instance, smṛti (memory) was an act of re-creation; to remember a verse was to inhabit its rhythm and meaning afresh. Similarly, in Western thought, thinkers from Aristotle to Augustine saw memory as the bridge between perception and understanding — the foundation of wisdom rather than its antithesis.
Modern education systems, however, have discredited memory by equating it with mere repetition. This stems partly from the behaviorist legacy, where memory was associated with conditioning, and partly from contemporary cognitive models that separate “knowing” from “feeling.” As a result, the learner’s emotional and aesthetic relationship with knowledge often remains underdeveloped. When students are encouraged only to critique and not to remember, they lose the affective continuity that makes learning personal and transformative.
Memory also shapes identity and selfhood. A learner who carries within them a treasury of meaningful experiences — intellectual and emotional — lives, metaphorically, “two inches above the ground.” Their education is not confined to what they can recall on demand but becomes a reservoir of resonant ideas and impressions that lend depth to daily life. In contrast, an education stripped of memory risks producing technically adept but emotionally detached learners.
To value memory, therefore, is not to regress into rote learning but to recognize remembrance as a creative act. Memory allows learners to perceive continuity — between disciplines, between past and present, between knowledge and living. Education that neglects this dimension may produce information but not wisdom.
Reclaiming memory means restoring the learner’s capacity for wonder, for sustained attention, and for emotional connection with what is learned. In doing so, education can once again become what it was meant to be — not merely the transmission of information, but the cultivation of meaning. For detail you may visit my youtube channel-
What a deeply insightful and timely reflection on education. This post reminds us that memory is not just about rote-learning facts — it is the soil in which our understanding, identity, and capacity to build meaning take root. By restoring memory as a core dimension of learning, we honour the continuity between past and present, and allow learners to build knowledge that truly lasts and shapes them. Thank you for reclaiming something so fundamental — because education without memory risks losing its soul.