Smartphones Mean You Will No Longer Have to Memorize Facts

[Commentary] 2013 is a tipping point, in which, for the first time in history, smartphones will outsell plain ones. So there's very little sense, as far as my son is concerned, in memorizing anything: presidents, the periodic table of the elements, the state capitals or the multiplication tables above 10. That's an understandable argument. On the other hand, there is a powerful counterargument: As society marches ever forward, we leave obsolete skills in our wake.

That's just part of progress. Why should we mourn the loss of memorization skills any more than we pine for hot type technology, Morse code abilities or a knack for operating elevators? Maybe memorization is different than those job skills. Maybe having a store of ready information is more fundamental, more important, and thus we should fight more fiercely to retain it. And yet we've confronted this issue before—or, at least, one that is almost exactly like it. When pocket calculators came along, educators and parents were alarmed about students losing the ability to perform arithmetic using paper and pencil. After hundreds of generations of teaching basic math, were we now prepared to cede that expertise to machines?