I've always thought it good and valuable -- yea, essential -- for youngsters to memorize great poetry and speeches, not to mention verses and chapters of the Bible. I wish I had done more myself. As I look back, one of my "singular accomplishments" (miniscule though it be) was memorizing Abraham Lincoln's Gettysburg Address for a 5th grade assembly program. I can still recite large portions of it and am the better for being able to do so. Michael Knox Beran has written a superb essay, "In Defense of Memorization" which explains the benefits of memorization. The article begins:
If there’s one thing progressive educators don’t like it’s rote learning. As a result, we now have several generations of Americans who’ve never memorized much of anything. Even highly educated people in their thirties and forties are often unable to recite half a dozen lines of classic poetry or prose.
Yet it wasn’t so long ago that kids in public schools from Boston to San Francisco committed poems like Shelley’s “To a Skylark” and Tennyson’s “Ulysses” to memory. They declaimed passages from Shakespeare and Wordsworth, the Psalms and the Declaration of Independence. Even in the earliest grades they got by heart snippets of “The Midnight Ride of Paul Revere” or “Abou Ben Adhem.” By 1970, however, this tradition was largely dead.
Should we care? Aren’t exercises in memorizing and reciting poetry and passages of prose an archaic curiosity, without educative value?
Yes we should care. Kids -- and our civilization -- are being deprived. Read the whole thing...
P.S. on the Gettysburg Address. . . Beran says:
American kids learned the Gettysburg Address, as profound a statement of the national ideal as anyone ever uttered; and those who remember as adults Lincoln’s affirmation of the nation’s dedication to the proposition that all men are created equal—and to government of the people, by the people, for the people—never can lose sight of what makes America exceptional.