Learning by Rote, A Thing of the Past?

As far back as my childhood school days I can’t recall being given an assignment to memorize anything except the Pledge of Allegiance to the flag and the multiplication table. Not so, my parents’ generation and their parents’. I used to love hearing one of them spontaneously start to recite a poem. Not just a part of it either, but the whole long thing! Then I’d listen on a deeper level and the rhyming words would become a gentle pulsation behind the ideas set forth. I’d marvel at my elders’ ability to remember all those lines and let them flow out fluently like another language. Not all were profound. My father used to charm us by reciting the narrative poem, Rip Van Winkle, but his mother, my Grandma Hattie, could recite the the whole Sermon on the Mount. She had memorized it while washing dishes by her kitchen window where she pinned to the curtain one passage at a time on a paper in her handwriting. At night if I was staying at her house she might sit on the bed silhouetted by candlelight and recite Longfellow’s poem about Hiawatha's mother.

By the shores of Gitche Gumee, By the shining Big-Sea-Water, Stood the wigwam of Nokomis, Daughter of the Moon, Nikomis. 

All you had to do was start the first lines of Paul Revere's Ride in those days and anyone could go on with them. My Auntie Dorris surprised us one day after dinner by reciting this poem called Invictus byWilliam Ernest Henley:

Out of the night that covers me,
 Black as the Pit from pole to pole, 
 I thank whatever gods may be 
 For my unconquerable soul.
 In the fell clutch of circumstance 
 I have not winced nor cried aloud. 
 Under the bludgeonings of chance
 My head is bloody, but unbowed. 
 Beyond this place of wrath and tears 
 Looms but the Horror of the shade, 
 And yet the menace of the years 
 Finds, and shall find, me unafraid. 
 It matters not how strait the gate, 
 How charged with punishments the scroll, 
 I am the master of my fate: 
 I am the captain of my soul.

 I was amazed. Auntie read mystery books by the dozens, but here was something she’d kept inside all those years.

My own education wasn’t without poetry. It just wasn’t required of us to memorize it. I found this one to be a favorite, not just because of the sentiment but because a man with my name had written it.

 I think that I shall never see  
A poem lovely as a tree.  
A tree whose hungry mouth is prest  
Against the sweet earth's flowing breast;  
A tree that looks at God all day, 
And lifts her leafy arms to pray;  
A tree that may in summer wear  
A nest of robins in her hair;  
Upon whose bosom snow has lain;  
Who intimately lives with rain.   
Poems are made by fools like me,  
But only God can make a tree.

 by Joyce Kilmer. 1886–1918

 I love the old school where poems rhymed although I can enjoy free verse too. The poems of James Whitcomb Riley and Robert Louis Stevenson were childhood favorites. Later I enjoyed John Greenleaf Whittier and Robert Frost, Carl Sandberg and others. But to tell the truth, I rarely sit down to read poetry, though I am now enjoying a copy of a fellow classmate's new book called Notes on Napkins, on paper napkins in coffee houses. He could be a poet laureate someday and I might say, "I knew him when..."

Why don’t we teach by rote anymore? I suppose the sparks of our own creativity could become dimmed by too much of it. We learn where to find the classics and that seems enough, but if we were stranded on a desert island? A lecturer I once heard who had been a prisoner of war for several years had, as a child, been required to memorize a poem of his dad’s choosing every week. Not just memorize it, but keep it in his memory by constant rehearsal. He was relieved of this when he left home, but later in that prisoners’ camp without anything to read he found comfort in remembering those poems and shared them with his neighbor in the next cell.The neighbor wanted to memorize them too and he shared them with his neighbor on the other side. This went on down the line and in this way they all became close friends. The poems helped them to rise above their boredom and homesickness. They helped to preserve their sanity.

Well, there’s one plaudit for learning by rote. I think a little of it would go a long way in today’s school curriculum. Maybe even impress our own grandchildren someday.