Turning Out the Lights

"Shocking" Power of Memorization

In his provocative book entitled Ten Ways to Destroy the Imagination of Your Child (ISI Books: Wilmington, Delaware, 2010), Anthony Esolen adopts the persona of an adviser giving parents some ideas on how to ruin their children's imagination.

One way is to discourage memory and memorization. He writes:

The memory, then, is not to be taken lightly. In children, it is surprisingly strong. Adults scoff at remembering things, because they have—so they say—the higher tools of reason at their disposal. I suspect that they also scoff at memory because theirs is no longer very good, as their heads are cluttered with the important business of life, such as where they should stop for lunch and who is going to buy the dog license. But educators of old, those whom we now recognize rightly as mere drillmasters, exposed children to a shocking wealth of poetry and music, and indeed would often set their lessons to easily remembered jingles as did Saint John Bosco, working with the street boys of late nineteenth century Turin, and as Marva Collins in Chicago did more recently, with unnerving success.  The memorization and recitation of poetry was one of the hallmarks of the so-called Integrated Humanities Program at the University of Kansas, in the late 1960's, under the direction of the Renaissance scholar John Senior.  The intensely personal encounter with poetry, which memorization requires, began to change so many lives that the trustees of the university, appropriately alarmed, shut the program down.  It lives on, however, in many a new Catholic school inspired by Professor Senior's method. 

No, if we want to stifle the imagination, we should hold that memory in check. We can do this in two ways. We can encourage laziness, by never insisting that young people actually master, for example, the rules of multiplication, or the location of cities and river and lakes on the globe. Then we can allow what is left of the memory to be filled with trash.
Esolen, ibid., p. 13f

Encouraging the faculty of memory and helping our children memorize gives them the furniture with which to think, helping their imaginations soar. Such children when they grow up can become powerfully influential for good, to say the least. One of the most potent shapers of our culture has been the poet, John Milton. He never read his own poem, Paradise Lost because he was blind. The poem dwelt in his mind while he created it, “with all its thousands and thousands of lines and interwoven images, (living) in his imagination, and in his memory.”

Alexander Solzshenitsyn, recently deceased, was imprisoned in Soviet death camps for years. Whilst there he composed—in his mind and memory—the thousands and thousands of lines which helped make up The Gulag Archipelago (he had neither pen nor paper), using rosary beads as a memory device. When finally released he wrote it all down, exposing for all to see the horrors of Soviet Communism. His writings, more than any other, brought about the collapse of the Soviet Union.

If we discourage our children's faculty of memorization, we turn out the light of their imagination.