Memory is the cabinet of the imagination, the treasury of reason, the registry of conscience, and, the council chamber of thought.
St. Basil
I’ve been reading and enjoying Getting it Wrong from the Beginning: Our Progressivist Inheritance from Herbert Spencer, John Dewey, and Jean Piaget in which Kieran Egan launches a blistering attack on the tenets of progressivism. What’s particularly interesting about it is that it’s written by a man who describes himself as “someone who has considerable sympathy with progressive ideals.” (p6)
I’ll write more on the general and fascinating thrust of the book another time. Today I want just to pick up some points Egan makes about rote learning. Spencer, Dewey and many others thought of rote learning as “vicious” and this caricature is still very much en vogue in many schools and across social media. How often do we hear ‘drill and kill’ dismissively disparaged? Even the dictionary defines rote as, “learning or memorisation by repetition, often without an understanding of the reasoning or relationships involved in the material that is learned.”
This is, perhaps, the one area where the dominance of progressive ideology has had a profound and lasting impact on the classroom. Nowadays it is rare indeed for children to be taught anything by rote. Or, to use a less pejorative term, by heart.
There have been some recent in-roads with Andrew Motion’s Poetry by Heart competition being championed by many writers and teachers, but essentially it remains a much maligned and neglected method of teaching. Egan’s point is that certain ways of thinking about education are so in grained that we fail to think about them and instead think with them; a term like rote learning “becomes understood increasingly literally and separately from the complex of education ideas that originally gave it meaning.” (p67) We don’t even consider whether rote learning might sometimes be an effective tool – we know, deep in our hearts that it is an instrument of evil, born in some bleak Gradgrindian hell hole, perpetrated on children in order to crush their eager little spirits. It is clearly anathema to the ideals of progressive education as it is unnatural, unpleasant and laborious.
This unthinking rejection of learning by heart has, in Egan’s words, deprived children of “developing those resources that come along with a wide and immediate access to some of the world’s greatest poetry and prose.”
And in a thundering broadside against the ‘you can just Google it’ brigade:
That they know where to go to find such poetry and prose perpetuates the absurdity that this is the same as knowing something. Knowledge does not exist in books or in computer files. They contain only codes that require a living mind to bring them back to life as knowledge.
Knowledge only exists as a function of living tissue. (p68)
This well-intentioned but disastrous move away from memorising the richness of what the world has to offer has impoverished everyone who has fallen under its sway. But learning things by heart is something we do automatically – especially as very young children. It comes naturally whether we’re recalling the words to nursery rhymes or reeling off stories word for word before we can read. Daniel Willingham says that the key is engagement: “If you’re really engaged, memory comes pretty automatically.”
Here are some reasons to learn something by heart:
- It’s a challenge – it feels pretty good to memorise stuff whether it’s a Shakespeare sonnet or the 7 times table
- It’s good training for our brains – we become better at retaining information through the practise of trying to retain it. And what does practice make? Permanent!
- We notice details which we would be otherwise miss
- Multiple readings or viewings help to better understand the material we are learning.
Watch this talk from Joshua Foer for further inspiration on the joy of memorising:
I learned firsthand that there are incredible memory capacities latent in all of us. But if you want to live a memorable life, you have to be the kind of person who remembers to remember.
Also, read these posts by Kris Boulton:
Should we force kids to memorise poems? Part 1: Poetry is hard
Should we force kids to memorise poems? Part 2 – How I learnt to stop worrying, and love the poem
Should we force kids to memorise poems? Part 3 – Should we?
Should we force kids to memorise poems? Part 4 – Junk Diet
I must admit, I still feel uneasy about having children memorise anything other than times tables. I’m not sure that anyone has ever told me that rote learning is wrong, but I wouldn’t want my head to walk in the middle of a session in which kids are repeating lines to a sonnet.
I try to keep open-minded, though, and challenge my own methods, thoughts and preferences. I find nothing more impressive than when someone recites a speech from shakespeare from heart, so why should memorising be considered intrinsically wrong? I suspect that context is important here; what surrounds the memorisation.
So here is an example of when I asked my year three class to memorise a poem. I wonder if any initial reticence associated with rote learning remains after I explain how i did it:
I gave a group of my year threes the task of memorising ‘Invictus’ by William Ernest Henley after we studied it together during a short literacy session.
Willingham’s engagement is indeed important. For Invictus, there were several appeals for the kids.
First, I told them that Nelson Mandela used to recite this poem (by heart) to other prisoners at Robben Island. Mandela was a real hero to the children after they learnt about him in an assembly and in an impromptu post assembly session that we had (they were fascinated and I ran with their interest, running a hasty apartheid/Mandela lesson/discussion).
Second, they knew that the poem looked hard. It had words like ‘unconquerable’ and ‘bludgeonings’. I told them that this was a high school poem, but I thought that they could handle it. They were well up for the challenge.
Third, I told them that if they learnt the words and got the expression and intonation correct, I would record them reciting it and turn it into a film, which would go on the TV outside school. Parents and children watch this whilst they wait for the gates to open, so it’s a big deal for them.
The finished product represents one of my proudest moments. At it’s heart, though, it was learning by heart.
I hope that, even if the sentiment of your post initially clashes with the readers’ philosophies, they keep an open mind and consider having a go at incorporating some rote learning into their lessons. Stories like mine might just help to detoxify the term.
Thanks Jon – I think it helps enormously to say ‘by heart’ instead of rote.
[…] I’ve been reading and enjoying Getting it Wrong from the Beginning: Our Progressivist Inheritance from Herbert Spencer, John Dewey, and Jean Piaget in which Kieran Egan lauches a blistering attack on the tenets of progressivism. What’s particularly interesting about it is that it’s written by a man who describers himself as “someone who has considerable sympathy with progressive […]
Just thinking about a list of things to teach by rote for GCSE English now
Lots to choose from 🙂
[…] Read more on The Learning Spy… […]
It’s easy to overlook what Spencer, Dewey et al meant when they criticised rote learning. They weren’t just referring to learning times tables or poetry, but to a method of teaching that was common in under-resourced schools in an era when books and paper were very expensive. For books and paper, schools substituted rote learning and slates.
Teachers were sometimes required to teach an entire school, pupils sitting on ‘forms’ arranged by age. The teacher recited the ‘lesson’ and the pupils repeated it until they’d memorised it. They were then tested by reciting the lesson to form ‘monitors’ – older children in the class or sometimes previous pupils. One advantage of this method was that it was cheap. Teachers needed very little expertise; they just needed to be able to read and to keep order.
This approach to learning had been used for centuries in religious institutions – and still is in some. The fact that the terms ‘lesson’, ‘forms’ and ‘monitor’ have survived in the education sector is testament to how widely this practice was used. Ellwood Cubberley describes it in more detail in his History of Education.
The practice of rote learning entire lessons was widely criticised because often all that was assessed was pupils’ ability to memorise, but no attempt was made to ensure that they understood what they had learned.
What’s happened over time is that people have increasingly assumed that the original criticisms of rote learning meant that rote learning of any sort was ineffective, or immoral or whatever.
We need to view early criticism of rote learning in context.
“We need to view early criticism of rote learning in context.” Yes. But we don’t. We just unthinkingly accept that it’s a ‘bad thing’
We also ‘launch blistering attacks’ on Spencer, Dewey et al and unthinkingly accept that that’s a good thing.
Maybe some of us do. I certainly don’t and Egan’s book is anything but unthinking. I’d always recommend reading the thing you’re critical of before dismissing it.
At our local primary they use the Story Making project (see http://www.ilrc.org.uk/media/archive_reports/Innovation%20Unit%20article%20re%20SM.pdf).
This is a lovely way for children to memorise stories, which they then re-tell to an audience of parents or other children. It is a far cry from the ‘by rote’ methods used in my own childhood. The children internalise the story structure by picking it apart and seeing how it is constructed. There are also various movements and gestures incorporated into the retelling which help them to remember the words. The way the memorisation is done allows the children to learn a lot about how stories are constructed, so it feeds into their writing. We use a slightly simpler version of this technique at preschool.
Thanks Sue – this looks lovely and emphasises the importance of distinguishing ‘rote’ from ‘by heart’
Ahhh…Pie Corbett is involved…you know it’s going to be quality 🙂
I really cannot be doing with this ‘blistering attack on progressivism’ stuff. The whole prog/trad thing is dreamed up by bandwagonners who were never there. Pshaw! As they say.
Anyroad up. Rote learning is and was always available as a technique to be used in the right context. My A level economics teacher made us learn, by rote, the Law of Diminishing Returns, and I can still recite it. We learned formulae. I coached children to learn songs off by heart — ‘coached’ is the word because the technique was quite encouraging and gentle. (‘The words are in front of you. See how far you can get without looking…..’) We certainly always expected children to learn tables — the idea that ‘They don’t learn their tables these days’ is another urban myth. We also encouraged children to learn and recite passages (albeit short snippets) from favourite books.
But Sue’s right, as usual, and so is @logicalincrementalism . Context, as always, is everything.
Hi Gerald – are you objecting to my phrase ‘blistering attack’ or the idea that someone might take prevailing assumptions to task? If it’s the former, then I apologise – it was merely rhetorical flourish. If it’s the latter, God help us!
Context is important but it certainly ain’t everything. Or are you a cultural relativist? That’s a dangerously slippy slope.
Really I was just in grumpy old man mode. What I was trying to say is that a ‘blistering attack on progressivism’ makes no more sense than a ‘blistering attack on, say, ‘popular music’, or ‘modern medicine’ or ‘the twentieth century novel’. That’s because it’s such a general, ill-defined term that it is, in the end, without meaning. Dawkins makes blistering attacks on Christianity. Whether you agree with him or not, it’s certainly possible to do that, because to be a Christian, you must hold and demonstrate quite a short list of essential beliefs and practices, thereby presenting yourself as a well-defined target. Can you decide to be an educational ‘progressive’? Adopting a list of essential beliefs and practices? I’d say not. So essentially it’s name calling isn’t it?
An urban myth has to be entirely untrue I think. Certainly my daughters’ schools didn’t advocate the learning of tables, I’ve heard of others and leading maths educationalists like Jo Boaler are in print saying they aren’t keen. It is also pretty normal to not give the rote learning of tables a high priority as secondary maths teachers seem to frequently comment they are not known very well. The level of effort to really ensure tables are ‘known by heart’ maybe put in at home by parents but many schools cringe at the methods necessary to really deeply engrain knowledge such as tables, such as chanting or repetitive testing of facts apparently already known (why aren’t you moving on?). I think fairly half hearted efforts are quite common but that lack of commitment or priority on really knowing in a way that means you’ll never forget, illustrates the problem.
I don’t understand your point about urban myths – I’m not claiming that anything is mythical here.
‘Moving on’ is an interesting issue. There’s little doubt that we forget at a predictable rate and rehearsal & revision of already learned material is pretty useful if we want to retain it.
Sorry, my reply was to Gerald. He mentioned that it is an urban myth that times tables are not taught in schools.
Yes, as in my reply to David, above, I was actually a bit grumpy old man. But I’d say that while it’s been less common (but not at all unknown) to hear tables chanted, it’s always assumed that primary teachers will expect children to learn tables and be able to come back with quick answers in oral tests. Primary teachers do, observably, bristle and snap back when accused of ‘not teaching kids their tables’.
This is a really interesting area. One of the problems is that where memorisation is expected (and I think it is for timetables) it is seen as a necessary evil, rather than interesting and enjoyable. So the use of mnemonics (aids to memory like Richard Of York Gave Battle In Vain to remember the colours of the rainbow: Red Orange Yellow Green Blue Indigo Violet… or my Dad’s fondly remembered SPAMB – to remember the main cities in Australia) is not encouraged.
The second problem is that memorisation (by rote, or otherwise) is seen as an alternative to other methods, when we should be seeing them as stages in a continuous process, for example: engage the students in the topic, scaffold their deeper understanding of it, select data that needs to be memorised, consciously practise recalling it, use that data and understanding as a platform to reach the next stage (I’m not saying this describes all the possibilities – it’s just an illustration).
I agree with Gerald that the prog/trad thing is cooked up by people who prefer arguing to teaching, and that’s why your everyday teacher is understandably confused at times.
Hi Andy – I agree that memorisation can/should be seen as enjoyable – hence the reason for linking to Josh Foer.
It might be very convenient to dismiss debates as irrelevant but that is, I think, a very dangerous position to take. This post (and Egan’s book) are in no way a defence of ‘traditional’ teaching; his point is that everything on which progressivism is based is mistaken. If he’s right then it behooves us to be aware of this. Saying the only people interested in advancing their knowledge in this way are those with a preference for being argumentative could be taken as pretty offensive.
For the record, I’m exasperated rather than offended by this kind of attempt to close down discussion.
Oops, sorry David. That last comment of mine was obviously not carefully written enough as I wouldn’t want to offend – or even exasperate – anyone! I am grateful for your bringing this book to people’s attention, and you are clearly trying to foster the kind of reflective debate that makes people wiser. What I meant, but clearly failed to express, is that ‘the prog/trad thing’, as I clumsily referred to it, is used by various media/online commentators (one either side) to stereotype and sneer at those they wish to oppose: the inflexible, chalk-and-talk ‘traditionalist’ versus the trendy, do-gooding ‘progressive’. That part of the debate I would like to close down and I felt that some of the previous comments were in that vein. I intended to express sympathy with your more thoughtful approach!
Oh – in that case, thank you very much: more power to you! 😉
I come from a generation of people who learned things by heart. As a child my party piece was the whole of The Walrus and the Carpenter – I recited it many many times – I can barely recall fragments now. I was always struck by the context of ‘by heart’ – many people I knew back then were more enamoured with the feat of memory than any ‘heart’ and would rattle stuff off for the sake of it.
Having said that – I distinctly remember two people reciting the whole of The Waste Land spontaneously in an adult poetry group I ran for over eight years. But my memories as a child were more to do with people’s smug “I can do this” than any connection with the writing – I guess this has coloured my perception ever since. I read poetry every day still but feel no need to learn it – I can pick up a book as soon as link to a web page.
Of course we can look in a book or on a website, but we can only think about what we know. Knowing a thing makes it part of ourselves and makes it part of our imaginative and emotional life. Knowing merely where to locate information is a very pale thing by comparison.
Anyway, I’m sorry your experiences of learning poetry were not happy ones – let’s take what’s good and reject the bad.
Did I say my experiences of learning poetry were not happy ones – I don’t remember saying that?
Good grief! It was an inference based on “But my memories as a child were more to do with people’s smug “I can do this” than any connection with the writing – I guess this has coloured my perception ever since.” If you were intending to imply something else by all mean do clarify.
Yes indeed – it was that people were using rote without thinking – as in dog through hoops trickery rather than the context. No grief needed David.
You can “know” a poem or a whole pantheon of poetry without having to memorise each and every word. As for rejecting the bad I doubt that philosophy would not get you very far in the making of great poetry. Take C K Williams’ ‘The Dog’ as an example. Its very cussed revelling in the bad is what, partly, makes it a great poem. Life would be pretty pallid without those high reliefs. http://www.scottishpoetrylibrary.org.uk/poetry/poems/dog
You can only know what you know. You can certainly ‘know’ a poem without memorising each and every word, but the only bits you’ll know of those bits you do remember. The rest is, at best, fleeting, half remembered mush which has no bearing on one’s interior life.
And I don’t follow your point about philosophy – I don’t suggest we become lotus eaters and pleasure seekers, just that we take what is useful and ‘good’ about learning by heart and try to avoid obsessing about the smugness of others and anything else which is a needless by product.
“The rest is, at best, fleeting, half remembered mush which has no bearing on one’s interior life.”
That’s just complete tosh and you know it David. You simply go and reference the poem again in a book or online if needs be. Some people have better memories than others no matter how much training is involved. To say otherwise is to demean people’s engagement with the poem – it is not about word perfect recall it is deeper than that so I disagree and strongly.
Go online and look at some of the poetry workshops on some Moocs – particularly the Coursera one:
https://www.coursera.org/course/modernpoetry
Each word is analysed in detail and focused on but they don’t memorise the poem. For me that’s a more interesting aspect of poetry and it endures. It is entirely embedded in one’s interior life.
Maybe a butterfly that is recaptured after many years…
I also take exception to the fact that I am “obsessing about the smugness of others” – I find that rather rude David (and apologies if I have misconstrued) – it is sniffily dismissive and closes down debate when the points made were quite pertinent and so I’ll make them again in more depth.
You can’t just cast aside what happened in the past as has been pointed out by previous commentators. And I agree context is all but I disagree that memorisation is the one key to one’s interior life. That is patently absurd. Yes, I admit those who have a gift for long term memory may find it resonant and pertinent in their lives and I’m reminded of Terry Waite and particularly John McCarthy, who, in times of crisis were able to dredge up whole poems from which they drew solace in their times of confinement. My point is to worry that the mechanics overshadow the meaning and this has been said before in this thread – I just feel it can so easily happen. You don’t need memorisation to feed your interior life – you don’t I’m afraid, no matter how much you might chant that as a mantra and to dismiss that demeans. Life is so much more.
The factors I mentioned did seem to be a regular by product and so we must be aware of these things and not sweep them under the carpet of history – I’d agree with Gerald here.
It doesn’t mean I don’t subscribe to rote learning but I’m not a fan of the decontexualised version.
I’ll leave you with a poem to ponder on – memorise maybe.
http://ireland.wlu.edu/landscape/Group5/poem.htm
1. I don’t for a minute think what I’ve said is ‘tosh’ – if I did I wouldn’t have said it. If you’re going to complain about rudeness then it behooves you not to be rude 😉
2. Of course you can cast aside what’s happened in the past.
3. If you can’t remember something, you don’t know it; If you do know something you can remember it. To suggest anything else is ‘absurd’.
4. You can only think about what you know. This is patently true: try thinking about something you don’t know.
1) It is playing with the concept of to “know” – you are playing the zero sum game.
2) If you think you can cast aside what has happened in the past and past influences then I suspect you are more naive than I imagined.
3) You don’t address my point in the least you are playing semantics.
4) You are, of course, putting words in my mouth again – as usual. I said you can reference the poem again and you know how to reference it because you have remembered the poem but not every exact word in the poem. You may even know the form and the narrative structure. See 3) and 1). We can go around forever I suspect.
At this point there would seem to be no further point in continuing. I for one have no interest in going round for ever.
This is very timely with my thinking – I have been reading Ian Gilbert’s book on why you need a teacher rather than google, and he DOES admit that learning by rote has its advantages, but then praises that form of learning where you visualise and come up with little stories to pin ideas on, and locations and situations. I’ve never found that I needed to use that – although I am amazed how extensive recall can be with it (e.g. remembering sequences of cards over four decks etc).
Personally, I have always found it easy to memorise short poems, or longish ones, but not to memorise longer texts, until around six months ago, when I found a new method. It does mean that you have to repeat what you’re memorizing twenty times initially, and then every day probably for the next ten days afterwards to have it completely, but if what you’re memorizing is good, nothing beats it. I’m using it to memorize Mark’s gospel – nearly finished chapter 5 so far.
I totally agree with all your benefits of memorizing, and could add some more! So many of the things we say are not great – they’re cliched, they’re slang, they’re ill-thought-through. Memorize something beautiful, or that has a logical train of thought, or that makes a powerful point or gives wise advice, and you’ve got it for life. What is more, it helps us to have a measure to appreciate other texts/ideas by. A great example that I memorized quite early was Kipling’s ‘If’. Not saying I agree with it all, but it still has some good sentiments! Memorizing is part of our moral education. As a teacher, I don’t force students to do it (perhaps I should) but I love it when they do. I like to recite bits of poems, and to show that I’ve got it off by heart myself. It shows passion.
Thanks for post!
In school, the only thing I remember learning “rote” are my times-tables. However, as a child, I enjoyed learning my favourite poems/songs and did so by having them read to me repeatedly or, when older, reading and re-reading them myself. I enjoyed being able to ‘read’ them in my head whenever I wanted – after lights out or just when sitting in a park.
Always liked the phrase “off by heart” and realise now that all the things that have stuck and I can still recall today are the things I memorised that I really loved.
[…] conflict with your moral and ethical beliefs about the world you will ignore it. If you believe rote learning is “vicious” and boring, who cares how effective it is a tool for […]
Great debate this. Let me mention one thing no-one else has, which is that singing words observably and dramatically improves learning by heart. I know many great poems only because when I was younger I studied and performed songs by British composers — Britten, Elgar, Vaughan Williams etc. So, for example, I know lots of Housman’s ‘Shropshire Lad’ cycle, and RL Stevenson’s ‘Songs of Travel’ and bore everyone on 1 May with the poem for that day written by Housman. Similarly I found my children would rapidly learn the words of any song I taught them, especially if reinforced with a touch of Makaton. (Do you ever see a school concert where the children are singing from a sheet? Thought not.) So if you want children to learn anything by heart, get a bit of rhythm (percussion maybe) into it, a tune if you can find or write one, and Makaton which is a brilliant reinforcer.
[…] conflict with your moral and ethical beliefs about the world you will ignore it. If you believe rote learning is “vicious” and boring, who cares how effective it is a tool for learning? Interpretivism […]
I am not so convinced as you on the “blistering attack on progressivism” from Egan – I do find his work rather more nuanced than that (and yes, I have read the book) and would support the bods above who want to see the idea of “role” or “learning by heart” examined as one of the range of tools of learning employed by teachers – allowing them to explore its effectiveness in their classrooms and with their pupils. I have no desire to close down any debate and would welcome responses.
In 2008 book Egan says in the introduction, “that progressive educators have been responsible for some of the most important and humane movements in modern schooling and are concerned that that children learn what is important about their world” (It is hard to know from this if he is using their in a constructivist paradigm or in a more generalist one). He goes on to say, “traditionalist educators are also human and look to make school more effective institutions for the welfare of children” and then “polemics are, as a result, generally enervating and fruitless for improving education” (p.x of the Introduction to “The Future of Education”)
[…] the colours of the rainbow and many other seemingly trivial but actually very useful things. Rote learning, or learning by heart if you prefer is routinely underrated. That’s not to say that rote is better than deliberate practice – this is an example […]