A RECENT PIECE in Newsweek prompts an editor to reflect on that subversive phrase “rote memorization.”

Reporter Paul Mooney uses the term–correctly, for once–in his story on the revival of Confucian education in China. Five-year-olds, it seems, are being taught to recite the Confucian classics by heart. Explains an official at the National Studies School in Beijing, “They don’t necessarily understand what they’re reciting. But gradually it will have an impact on their thinking.” Critics, writes Mooney, complain that China’s schools already suffer from “too much rote memorization, not too little.”