Education on Mars

In the year 2025 – much to everyone’s surprise – an entire civilisation is discovered living beneath the surface of Mars. Even more surprisingly, the aliens bear a striking resemblance to us - prompting speculation about a common ancestor.

After first contact is made, delegations are assembled for the purposes of establishing a better understanding of our respective cultures and – as a learning expert – you are asked to go along.

You are astonished to find that they too have an education system - one remarkably like ours. ‘Younglings’ sit in rows while an instructor supervises them. They remain in this system for a period of ten years, culminating in a final examination, before applying for employment.

Only the curriculum is different. The younglings spend 10 years memorising Pi (3.141592…) to as many decimal places as possible.

The final examination tests their memory of Pi – the average student can recall Pi to around 10,000 places, and grades (from A to F) are awarded depending on how many decimal places they can recall.

You politely enquire of your host whether Pi plays a central role in their culture – to which they respond that it does not, and that in fact most students forget what they have learned shortly after the exam, with the average adult only recalling it to around 100 places. There are hardly any jobs that actually require a person to know the number Pi by heart (which after all they could easily look up), with the exception of the role of 'instructor'.

The more you investigate, the more things strike you as very odd about this system:

• It doesn’t seem likely that a person’s ability to memorise Pi would be a very good way to choose them for a job.
• If people forget most of their learning, it’s not clear why it is worth teaching them in the first place.
• Watching the younglings in the classroom it is clear that many really struggle with the tasks of memorising Pi – and you wonder if what is going on isn’t more like some kind of ‘torture’.

Lastly there is lots of ‘scientific evidence’ about the most effective ways to get younglings to memorise Pi, but it doesn’t seem to you that this is really evidence about learning per se – since memorising numbers isn’t the kind of thing that they evolved to do. It’s the kind of thing a book or a computer does perfectly, but a creature very badly. You wonder if the ‘educational’ research really has anything to do with learning at all.