Education Is What Remains After One Has Forgotten What One Has Learned in School

In 1885 the German psychologist Hermann Ebbinghaus tested his own memory by learning lists of nonsense syllables and measuring how many he could recall after various intervals. He found that forgetting is rapid at first and then slows, so that most of what is learned is lost within days unless it is revisited. The forgetting curve that he drew has been confirmed many times. If it applies to what a student crams for examinations, then little of school remains a decade later. The topic, a line attributed to Albert Einstein and echoed by the psychologist B. F. Skinner in 1964, asks what, if anything, is left.

Ask any adult what remains of the chemistry, history and geometry of school and the answer is usually little. A few names, a formula or two, a sense of the shape of the periodic table. Yet the same adult may be able to read a newspaper critically, to estimate a bill, to doubt a rumour and to stay with a problem until it yields. These abilities were not taught as separate subjects. They were developed through the effort of learning subjects that have since been forgotten, as a muscle remains after the weights are put away.

The aphorism therefore distinguishes information from education. Information is the content of lessons, the dates and definitions that fill textbooks. Education is a change in the person, in the way he thinks, what he cares about and what he is capable of. John Dewey argued in Democracy and Education in 1916 that the aim of schooling is the growth of the ability to learn further. A person is educated, in this view, when he can continue to educate himself, and facts are the occasion for that growth and not its product.

India has produced its own versions of the thought. Rabindranath Tagore, disillusioned by the rote learning of the colonial school he had attended, founded a school at Santiniketan in 1901 where children studied under trees and learnt through song, nature and craft. Gandhi's Nai Talim, or basic education, proposed in 1937, taught children through productive work such as spinning and gardening, believing that hand, heart and head develop together. Both rejected the idea of school as a place where a child is filled with information. They held that its task was to form character and capacity.

Both rejected the idea of school as a place where a child is filled with information.

The idea gains support from the findings of psychologists. Robert Bjork has shown that conditions that make learning feel harder, such as spacing out practice and testing oneself, produce slower apparent progress but longer lasting results, which he calls desirable difficulties. Other researchers distinguish between knowing a fact and having a flexible mental model, which transfers to new problems. The first is what vanishes first. The second appears to survive. The student who once struggled to understand how a lever works may forget the formula but retain a feel for how forces balance.

The dispositions that remain are among the most valuable. Curiosity, the habit of asking why, is one. Perseverance, the willingness to stay with something difficult, is another. Intellectual honesty, the ability to say I do not know, and the courage to change one's mind in front of evidence, are others. A school that fosters these has done its job even if every date is forgotten, and a school that fills its pupils with facts at the cost of these habits has failed even if its results are excellent. Examinations measure what fades, and cannot easily measure what stays.

Yet the topic should not be read as a licence to belittle knowledge. A person cannot think critically about a subject he knows nothing about. The cognitive scientist Daniel Willingham has pointed out that skills such as reading comprehension and problem solving depend heavily on background knowledge, and that a reader who lacks the relevant facts cannot understand a text however clever he is. E. D. Hirsch has argued for the same reason that a shared core of knowledge is a condition of equal opportunity, since children from privileged homes absorb it at the dinner table, while others get it only in school.

This points to a subtle relationship. The forgotten facts were not wasted, because they were the material from which the lasting capacities were built. A person who has read many poems and forgotten most still has an ear for language. A person who has solved a hundred equations and cannot remember one still has a sense of how to approach the next. Forgetting, in this sense, is the removal of scaffolding from a building that stands. But the building could not have been put up without the scaffolding, and what remains cannot be had without what was lost.

The practical consequence for education is that curricula and examinations should be designed with the residue in mind. Teachers might ask what a student will retain in twenty years and design lessons to produce that, through projects, discussion and tasks that call for judgement. The National Education Policy of 2020 speaks of a move from rote learning to competence and critical thinking, though the success of such reform depends on classrooms and on examination systems that still reward memory. A student rewarded for reproducing answers will learn to reproduce answers. Assessment is the hardest part, since what remains cannot be graded in June. Some schools have begun to ask former pupils what they still use, and the answers rarely mention the syllabus. They mention a teacher who took them seriously, a project that went wrong and a habit of checking. These are small data, but they point at the right target.

An uncomfortable question follows from the aphorism. If education is what remains once the content is forgotten, then it cannot be seen at the time it occurs, nor can it be tested by the examination that follows. It is revealed only years later, in a life, and no school can be sure what it has produced. The teacher plants what he cannot see growing, and must trust that something remains even from the lessons that the pupil himself has forgotten ever having received.