Something to Have at Heart: Another Look at Memorization

Abstract

T the baby out with the bathwater”—when I was little, I loved to hear my parents use this comic metaphor. Forty years later, thinking about the lost practice of “learning by heart,” this expression comes back to me: as educators, we threw the baby out with the bathwater. I’d like to trace memorization’s venerable—and sometimes ludicrous—history in education, recall its fall from academic favor, explore the ways it can enrich our students’ relationships with words and books, and empower their personal lives, and encourage its return to our classrooms. Memorization was vital to our pre-literate ancestors, the only reliable way they could keep track of and pass down to their children any kind of knowledge. What wasn’t learned verbatim might be forgotten or perhaps fatally misremembered, so, as Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi explains, “Lists of edible herbs and fruits, health tips, rules of behavior, patterns of inheritance, laws, geographical knowledge, rudiments of technology, and pearls of wisdom were all bundled into easily remembered sayings or verse” (Flow 121). After societies became literate, memorization continued to play a central role in education. In the western world, well into the beginning of the twentieth century, memorization of the Greek and Roman epics, of poetry, and of celebrated prose passages formed an important part of a student’s work. Traditional religious education has always involved memorization, even among those religions which so venerate their scriptures as written words that they are called “People of the Book”: Jews, Christians, and Muslims. Memorization was a central practice in the education of Jewish boys. Teacher: “Would you first like to recite something from the Torah?” Child: “Of course, that is what I was created for” (Brumberg 92). In the Hasidic yeshivas, the tradition of “