One of my professors recently commented on his father’s ability to recite pages and pages of Shakespeare from memory, of which he’d learned sometime in childhood. He described the joy it brought his father to stake ownership to the text, to use it in embellishing and connecting to a moment. Doubtlessly, few in his class could relate. As beneficiaries of progressive education, most of us haven’t memorized a thing.
According to contemporary pedagogy, the idea of rote learning is a joke. It challenges much of what we’ve learned about teaching since the educational Stone Age. Of course, for my professor’s father’s generation, it wasn’t uncommon to memorize passages from Richard III, or Coleridge’s poetry, or Hamilton and Madison’s writings. Somewhere along the line we figured out how to make tools out of copper.
So it goes: there is little educative value to memorization, we’re told. It’s all online anyway, and who of the curious among us doesn’t recognize the advantages of having so much information at our fingertips? But there are distinct benefits to combining poetry and prose with memorization, regardless of the comparative advantages espoused by modern schooling. Cognitive broadening and a connection to the ideals of civilization are at stake.
At no point in Western history, since the value of education was established, have educators betrayed memorization and recitation as an intricate part of their tradition. In Athens, students would memorize Homer and portions of the epic cycle as a way of mastering their language and culture. Peter Brown described the importance of Virgil’s Aeneid to the later education of St. Augustine: “Every word, every turn of phrase was significant and the student saw this. The aim was to measure up to the timeless perfection of the ancient classic.”
One does not easily become a slave to the text, as many critics of memorization assert. It is usually to the contrary. When an epic or a poem transmits through us an appreciation of the passions of human life, we are freer in our pursuit of knowledge and the good. A young William Shakespeare, Michael Wood observed, “was the product of a memorizing culture in which huge chunks of literature were learned by heart. It offered him many rewards, not least a sense of poetry, rhythm and refinement—a heightened feel for language, as well as an abundance of tales and myths, imaginative resources that are among the most exciting gifts a young person can receive.”
Our experience in America, early in the 20th century, with memorization as preferred educational doctrine was a positive one. Educators recognize the incredible capacity in young children for mastery of classic and contemporary material. Prose in verse imparts upon children the structures inherent in language itself; just as many musicians vouch for the melodic and harmonic value of music in its relation to the soul, the abstract logic in poetry conveys “order, measure, proportion, correspondence, balance, symmetry, agreement, temporal relation, and contingent possibility.” According to Michael Knox Beran, this is exactly how we organize sensory experience.
It is not just about young children and their development of intellect. There is an importance in understanding the content itself, for those of any age. We are inheritors of an intellectual tradition that, while often challenged by those of higher education, is worth receiving and owning in its entirety. Great poetry and literature in its deepest form, which manifests itself in the heart as well as the mind, is an expression of a certain culture and its accumulated experience. We convey to ourselves and others a traditional Western wisdom, in context, when we have the ability to recite portions of that experience.
Replacing memorization with the sensitivities of progressive education does not achieve its goals of inner liberty. In fact, by neglecting the extensive intellectual manifold of the past it limits students far more than a devotion to any one text could. To memorize is often to possess, the way my professor’s father possesses an ennobled sense of himself in relation to Shakespeare and an essential connection a broader culture we’re unfortunately told to keep out of our hearts and minds.
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