Memorizing for exams is Important?

Education Secretary Michael Gove is giving a talk to the Independent Academies Association in which he will argue that:

• Memorisation is a necessary precondition of understanding
• Only when facts and concepts are committed securely to the working memory, so that it is no effort to recall them and no effort is required to work things out from first principles, do we really have a secure hold on knowledge.
• Memorising scales, or times tables, or verse, <allows us to> display greater creativity.

More details of the speech can be found here

We already know that he has plans to replace GCSEs with ‘O Levels’, three hour terminal exam with set percentage pass boundaries. Article

All in all it looks like a big change on the way for education – that’ll make a change then!