rote-learning

Updated: May 11, 2025

He is taught to do right, not because right action is in the nature of things, the nature of himself and the things about him, but because he will be punished somehow if he does not. He is given a medley of words without ideas. He is taught declensions and conjugations without number in his own and other tongues. He learns things easily by rote; so his teachers fill him with rote-learning.

David Starr Jordan - The Story of the Innumerable Company, and Other Sketches

It became at an early age, and remained for many centuries, a rote-learning of the elementary text-books, followed by a similar acquisition by heart of the texts of the works of Confucius and other classical writers.

E. T. C. (Edward Theodore Chalmers) Werner - Myths and Legends of China