Learning 'by heart' is valuable
- Joanne Jacobs
- 6 days ago
- 2 min read
The world is too much with us; late and soon,
Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers;—
Little we see in Nature that is ours;
. . . Great God! I’d rather be
A Pagan suckled in a creed outworn;
So might I, standing on this pleasant lea,
Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn;
Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea;
Or hear old Triton blow his wreathèd horn.
-- William Wordsworth
I memorized and recited that sonnet in high school, nearly 60 years ago. I recite the first part to myself from time and time, and occasionally I remember the punch of old Trion blowing his wreathèd horn. It belongs to me.
Daniel Buck's middle schoolers love memorizing poetry, he writes on The Hill. "At recess, students who chose the same poem practiced them together on the swings. An otherwise meek little girl found her voice and recited her poem proudly before her peers. On presentation day, for one hour, we traded a classroom for Dickinson’s New England, Wordsworth’s Lake District, and Frost’s snowy wood."
When I was still teaching, as the school grounds filled up with snow, students came to visit me during my office hours and practiced their poems, sometimes smiling, sometimes frowning with earnest concentration. Among the students, it became the most anticipated assignment that I gave all year.
Once it was common for children to learn and recite poems and great speeches by heart, he writes. In the 20th century, progressive educators have seen memorization as the enemy of thinking.
They didn't think it was important to memorize phonemes or the times tables, much less a Shakespeare speech or a Wordsworth sonnet.
It's a mistake, Buck argues. "From a purely utilitarian standpoint — before we even get to poetry — the memorization of the basic academic content is a necessary condition for all advanced thought."
While modern educators add "the modifier 'rote' to memorization, we once called this practice 'learning by heart'," he writes.
If you learn it, it's yours.
There is no thinking without memorizing, wrote Jon D. Schaff in 2023, when he helped develop new social studies standards for South Dakota.
His team called for students to memorize the opening paragraphs of the Declaration of Independence and the preamble to the U.S. Constitution. Critics said teachers should focus on "thinking skills" rather than content.
These "faddish educational notions" harm students, Schaff argues. "What is often derided as 'rote-learning' is actually essential to sophisticated analysis." We draw on foundational knowledge to think about concepts.
We had to memorize the Preamble to the Constitution -- with correct punctuation -- to move from eighth grade to high school. Yes, I still know it.
E.D. Hirsch explains it well, in one of his books (I think it's in the intro. to Cultural Literacy): what you've memorized is what you know beyond question.
His example was a chessboard from a partially-played game: if you saw that board, before the board was (for example) dropped, could you put the pieces back in their proper places?
People who don't know chess couldn't do it; where the various pieces are located (in a game in progress) is more or less random to them, even if they may know how to 'set up the board' before the game starts.
People who play chess at a high level, of course, had grasped--from the positioning of the pieces--where the game was,…
I wish the fatwa on memorization would be lifted. I was fortunate that in the early sixties, it was still expected that children would memorize addition tables and multiplication tables. Spelling bees spurred another bout of memorizing. But even then, the practice of memorizing poems and literary passages had become passé.
My mother, who’d been educated in the thirties, had memorized literature and retained it all her life. She had all that lovely writing in her head to draw upon instantly and it showed even in the clever and witty letters she would write to her family.