Humph remembers to forget

Humphrey remembers a great deal: where things are, how to complete daily chores, routes around town, lots and lots of words, and of course people he knows and loves. But sometimes, he forgets things!

The contemplative canine, at Bayview Village

A clever dog celebrates forgetting - that's something Humph learned from City University of New York Professor and theoretical physicist Michio Kaku, who recently made an appearance on The Daily Show to promote his new book, The Future of the Mind: The Scientific Quest to Understand, Enhance, and Empower the Mind.

What was it he said? Oh yes, that forgetting things serves an important biological function. Those with a photographic memory, Dr. Kaku explained, "forget to forget." While it makes for a neat parlor trick (or standardized exam strategy) to remember every little detail, eventually it's not so great. He claims that rare cases of people who lose the ability to forget become so overwhelmed with information, they can no longer function, do day to day tasks, or even hold down jobs. Rather, a brain is supposed to filter information and forget things that are not necessary for survival.

This got Humphrey thinking about certain types of schooling (readers remember that Humph classifies "schooling" as the bureaucratic counterpart to the project of "education"). When schools have prescriptive, narrow curricula that emphasize fact recall, they are actually requiring students to go against this biological need to forget certain things. Those who do well on (certain types of) standardized tests are remembering things that they will likely forget right after the tests when their brains "remember to forget."

Humph has long subscribed to the idea that those little ones he schools in the daycare will not remember the facts he is required to "deliver" (in Paulo Freire's words, where Humph is required to "fill the empty vessel" of the learner's mind with facts that come from Humph!).

This certainly complicates matters of thinking about schooling, it's purpose and normative ideas about it's structure.

Ummmm....what was Humph just talking about?