November 23, 2005
In Defense of Memorization Posted by Frederic D. Schwarz at 01:30 PM EST In another part of this Web site, our colleague Josh Zeitz has written about the Gettysburg Address. On his way to revealing the deeper significance of Lincoln’s words, he mentions that schoolteachers used to make their students memorize the speech. Josh doesn’t think this was a good idea, and I agree that the rote approach can be taken too far. But I believe there is a place for memorization in learning, and I regret that modern educational practice seems to have gotten away from it. The advantage of being made to memorize things is that they stick with you for decades to come, whether you like it or not. My parents can still recite poetry that they learned by heart in the 1930s, and it’s a common observation among doctors that they remember the jingles they memorized to help them identify the cranial nerves (“On old Olympus’ towering top . . .”) long after they’ve forgotten the names of the nerves themselves. I had to learn the state capitals in the fifth grade, and while a few have slipped my mind in the intervening years, I can still reel off capitals like Salem and Pierre and Jefferson City, none of which I would otherwise even have heard of. So while rote is no substitute for real learning, it has its place as a means of wedging something into a student’s brain so tightly that it will never get out, no matter how unpleasant the process of learning it was. Drag a kid to a museum, and he’ll end up hating museums for the rest of his life; force a kid to write something, and he’ll consider writing a chore forever. But make a kid memorize something, and he’ll always be able to trot it out when he needs it. Admittedly, state capitals are of little use outside the crossword page, but if you can squeeze a piece of good writing, one that positively sings, into someone’s head, a world of benefits may result. And despite its infelicities, the Gettysburg Address does sing—though it’s so familiar to most of us that we notice its music about as much as we notice “California Dreaming” when we hear it on the radio for the 700th time. Yet that’s exactly why today’s kids should be made to memorize the Gettysburg Address. While a song that’s stuck in your head is merely an annoyance, a well-crafted text that’s stuck in your head will improve your writing for life, coming out of nowhere to resonate encouragingly whenever you manage to achieve something similar. That’s why old-fashioned teachers resorted to memorization, and it’s something that today’s teachers should consider as well.
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