The night before a test, a child stares at a textbook, chanting a rhyme to remember a historical date. On the desk beside them sits a smartphone that would give the same answer in one second.
"Is there any point in memorizing this?" When a child asks that, how many adults today could confidently explain that there is?
Schoolwork in Japan is still built around memorization. But now that we have Google, smartphones, and AI, is memorizing really a job for humans?
Leave memorizing to machines
When it comes to remembering, humans cannot compete with machines.
By one estimate, the information a person learns and keeps over a lifetime amounts to about 125 MB. Let us compare that with what is on the internet.
| Information | Size | Compared with human memory |
|---|---|---|
| What a person remembers over a lifetime | about 125 MB | — |
| Text of English Wikipedia | about 26.8 GB | about 200× |
| Web pages held by Google Search | over 100 million GB | over 800 million× |
*English Wikipedia: text of all articles without media, compressed (as of September 2026). Google: total size of its web page index. These are different kinds of figures, so treat the comparison as a rough guide.
Even Wikipedia is only a tiny fraction of what Google Search holds. And machines never forget what they store, and can retrieve it instantly when needed. There is no point in humans competing with machines on how much they can remember.
In fact, our minds have already started handing memory off. In 2011, a research team from Columbia University and other institutions published an experiment in the journal Science. When people expected to be able to look information up later, they remembered less of it, and remembered better where to find it instead. The researchers described the internet as having become a form of "external memory" for people.
This does not mean our minds got lazy. We handed the job of remembering to our tools, and began using our minds for something else.
Even the government says rote memorization has lost value
Japan's official education debate is starting to point the same way.
In October 2026, the Central Council for Education at the Ministry of Education (MEXT) compiled its report toward the next national curriculum guidelines. It states plainly that, with the development of AI, the value of "rote memorization without understanding of meaning" and of "assessment that competes excessively on the amount of knowledge alone" has fallen further.
On social studies, it notes that "partly due to entrance exams, there is a deep-rooted tendency to be assessed on how many terms one has memorized," and that this is one reason textbooks keep getting thicker. The government itself has acknowledged that there is too much memorization in Japanese schools.
Does memorization really have value?
Still, many people insist that memorization has value. Let us look at the reasons usually given, one by one.
| Common reason | In reality |
|---|---|
| (1) It trains the mind (memory) | Research says no. In 1901, psychologist Edward Thorndike and a colleague showed experimentally that practicing one ability does little to improve other, even similar, abilities. A 2020 analysis combining 41 studies of memory training in children (2,375 children) found that tasks close to the training improved, but intelligence and other abilities barely changed. Memorizing dates only makes you better at memorizing dates. |
| (2) You never know what will be useful | That is a reason to be exposed to many things, not a reason to memorize them. Interest comes from seeing and trying things. |
| (3) Without common knowledge, you cannot follow conversations | Having heard of something is enough. You do not need to memorize it well enough to write it on a test. |
| (4) It builds tolerance for boring work | There is little evidence for this, and making children do work they find meaningless can turn them off learning altogether. Persistence grows when children work toward something they want to do. |
| (5) It is on entrance exams and tests | That is simply what the system demands. It is not a reason memorization itself has value. |
Memorizing things that neither interest you nor connect to your work has almost no value beyond scoring points on tests.
What to train with the time freed up
Letting go of memorization frees up a great deal of children's time. What we should train with it are the abilities that cannot be handed to machines.
The first is the ability to ask questions. AI answers what it is asked, but it does not tell you what you should ask.
The second is the ability to look things up and check them. AI makes mistakes that sound convincing. Do not take its answers at face value; check them against other sources. What this requires is not memorized knowledge, but the habit of taking that extra step.
The third is the ability to put what you want to make into words and give it shape. If you cannot put the image in your head into words, you cannot even ask AI for help.
The fourth is the ability to keep trying when things do not work. You will almost never reach the right answer on the first try.
Turn memorization time into training time
None of these four can be learned by memorizing a textbook. They grow only by actually trying, failing, and trying again. That is why the time spent on memorization should go to this kind of training instead. Education needs to move in that direction.
The same goes for tests. If we truly must rank people by how smart they are, it is enough to use only problems that cannot be solved by memorization: the ability to understand a text you have never seen, and the ability to reason step by step. In terms of school subjects, that would look a lot like math and reading comprehension.
There are things families can do, too. Rather than asking whether your child has memorized something, ask what they made, or what they doubted and looked up. And when they ask, "Is there any point in memorizing this?", it is fine to answer, "You don't need to memorize it. Instead, let's try making something with it."
*
At Digital Kodomo BASE's After-School Lab, children decide for themselves what they want to make, and build games and other projects using search and AI along the way. When they do not know something, they look it up on the spot; when an AI answer seems wrong, they check it and fix it. We want to give children time not for memorizing, but for asking, investigating, and making.