Forgetting, Flashcards and the Philosophy of Learning

I often wonder: if Socrates had Anki, would he have bothered with the whole “know thyself” thing? Or would he have been too busy reviewing “Front: What is virtue? / Back: A form of knowledge.”

Perhaps both. Because, in the end, learning is less about cramming facts and more about weaving connections between them. Memory is not a filing cabinet; it’s a living web. And flashcards, surprisingly, can either help us build that web - or reduce knowledge to a box-ticking exercise.

Building my own flashcard generation workflow for personalized learning has been a crash course not just in coding, but in pedagogy, cognitive psychology, and the messy business of what it really means to know something. And out of the experiments, frustrations, and “why on earth can’t I remember that?” moments, three key lessons have emerged.

Lesson 1: Comparison is the Thief of Joy, but the Mother of Understanding

A simple card might ask: What was the French Revolution?A better card might ask: How did the American and French Revolutions differ?

The difference matters. Comparison forces the brain to connect dots, not just light them up individually. And it turns out this is exactly how memory strengthens: through relationships, analogies, contrasts. In cognitive science, this is sometimes called elaborative encoding - the act of tying new information to old information in as many ways as possible.

When flashcards evolve from isolated definitions to comparative questions, they stop being rote and start being relational. And relational knowledge is the kind that sticks.

Lesson 2: Depth Doesn’t Sacrifice Breadth - It Powers It

A recurring dilemma in learning: should I rush to cover all the ground (breadth) or pause to deepen my understanding of a single moment (depth)?

Take a simple fact: The American Revolution achieved independence. That’s fine. But ask why - why did the American Revolution stabilise into a functioning republic while the French Revolution spiralled into terror? - and suddenly one card of history opens a door into economics, social structures, leadership, and ideology.

That depth doesn’t slow you down; it cements the shallow fact so firmly that you can now sprint faster across other events. Once you grasp why the American path differed from the French, you can make sense of revolutions elsewhere with much less effort.

This is the paradox of learning: depth actually accelerates breadth. A well-connected idea becomes a mental landmark, making the rest of the territory easier to navigate.

Lesson 3: Not Every Detail Deserves Equal Worship

The final lesson was harder to swallow: not everything is worth remembering.

Some details - like the name of every faction in the French Revolution or every skirmish in the American - slip away, no matter how many times you drill them. At first, this feels like failure. But then the question becomes: do I need to recall every pamphlet, speech, and decree? Or is it enough to know the shape, the intent, and where to look when I need the detail?

Flashcards aren’t about becoming a human historian. They’re about training intuition, fluency, and recall of the concepts that matter most. Sometimes that means reframing a question so it points you to the turning point (say, Saratoga or the Reign of Terror). Sometimes it means letting go of the trivial, trusting that “open book” recall - or simply knowing where to check - is enough.

The real goal of learning, after all, is not flawless regurgitation. It’s flexible application. It’s the ability to ask better questions about history - even when you don’t yet know all the answers.

Closing Thought

In building this flashcard workflow, I didn’t just discover better ways to remember - I discovered better ways to forget. Forgetting the inessential frees up space for the connective tissue of knowledge: comparisons, reasons, meanings.

So perhaps Socrates didn’t need Anki after all. Because the real flashcard he lived by was a single, endless prompt: What is the difference?