What Is Truly Learned Is Never Forgotten, Right?

Victoria Cantú

Oct 6, 2020

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My grandfather used to scold, affectionately, his children and grandchildren whenever he asked us about something from school and we could not answer because we simply did not remember. In his intellectual old-man tone, he would say, “What is well learned is never forgotten.” For most of my life, I felt guilty about having earned good grades and still being unable to remember much from my classes, because according to my grandfather’s phrase, if I had forgotten it, then I must not have learned it properly.

During the short time I studied medicine, yes, now you know my small secret, I took a fascinating course on neuroscience and its relationship to learning. In that class, I learned that the child’s brain is in full development and has an incredible level of synapse formation. Synapses are the connections between neurons that form each time new information enters and gets stored. Those connections remain in long-term memory when positive emotions and repetition accompany the learning. Without those conditions, synapses weaken and eventually disappear.

That was when I understood that I had probably learned my school subjects very well after all. I studied them carefully, did my assignments with dedication, and at the time I was perfectly able to explain them to classmates who did not understand. My real issue was that once the school year, the semester, or the subject ended, I stopped reviewing the topic, practicing it, or connecting with it in any way. The synapses that had been formed in my brain became weaker and probably disappeared. At that moment, I finally stopped feeling guilty about disappointing my beloved late grandfather.

The point of this story is to help us understand what we need to do with children if we want them to truly learn for life. Children may be very intelligent and may learn quickly, but that does not guarantee that what they learn will still be with them when they are older.

It works much like a sponge. If you leave a sponge in a container of water and keep adding more water from time to time, the sponge stays wet. But if you wet the sponge once and assume that is enough, after a few hours under the sun the moisture evaporates and the sponge becomes dry, as if it had never been wet at all.

The same thing happens with children, and honestly also with teenagers and adults. When they learn something new, they may understand it well, apply it, and even feel excited because that new knowledge was useful. But if they assume they know it so well that they will never forget it, and stop putting it into practice, after some time they may barely remember it at all. It would be very different if they reviewed the topic several times a week, tried to apply it in different everyday situations, and kept interacting with it. In that case, the synapse in the brain that stores that information gets reinforced and becomes much harder to lose.

We can help our children avoid forgetting what they have truly learned. We should not leave the work of teaching exclusively to schoolteachers. Instead, we should try to bring school topics into the child’s everyday life, helping them remember, review, connect, and apply what they learn in school to daily life. That way, even when they become adults and formally finish their studies, the habit of staying “wet” from so much water received in childhood will remain, and they will know how to seek out more water on their own. Their sponge will not dry out.