In a short article, What Does Memorization Have To Do with Learning?, Marina Olson addresses what I consider one of the greatest failings of the American educational system and, more generally, of American attitudes toward human culture and, indeed, all of Creation. Ms Olson’s article deals with one educator who seemed to attack memorization (Orlin) and one who advocated memorization (Leithauser) with these words which approach a greater wisdom about the human mind but fails to reach that greater wisdom, in my opinion, because of an inadequate understanding of created being. The article ends with this summary:
Orlin explains that “what separates memorization from learning is a sense of meaning.” For Leithauser, “to take a poem to heart was to know it by heart.” That is certainly not a sense of memorization devoid of meaning. Rather, Leithauser has taken the poem into himself in such a way that it has become connatural to himself. This is leagues apart from Orlin’s description of memorizing only necessary facts to obtain a high grade in a class. In fact, when speaking of poetry, Orlin describes his own experience with writing a paper on Robert Frost’s Once by the Pacific:
“I read it dozens of times, dissecting every phrase. Months later, standing on a rocky, storm-swept beach, I found that I could recite the poem by heart. I never set out to memorize it. I just…did.”
Both Orlin and Leithauser, in their seeming opposition, strike at the need for teachers to encourage students not to be satisfied with becoming mere repositories of factoids, but rather to allow their lessons to infuse them. Such is the nature of learning.
As I noted in a recent essay, Communal Being and Communal Sin:
There is a small example of our moral decay which says much about this issue [of communal being and communal sin]. Students in religious education no longer memorize Bible verses. Students in public and other schools no longer memorize important speeches or parts of the Declaration of Independence or the Constitution of the United States. Instead, they go home to fill their empty memories with biographical knowledge of disordered cretins in the entertainment industries; they fill their hearts with the lyrics of songs about sexual violence and recreational drugs and disordered teenaged anger; they shape their habits to their own immediate desires rather than learning the habits and customs of their traditions.
Human beings memorize as a natural matter. If there is no Iliad or Henry V to fill their memories, no noble speeches, no facts about the lives of great men and women, they will fill their undisciplined but powerful memories with the products of a trashy entertainment industry or a whorish `news’ industry. We should remember that great writers and orators, including Abraham Lincoln—not so great a political leader in my opinion, drew upon large stores of memorized quotations from the Bible, Shakespeare, Milton, Virgil, Horace, Homer, and so on. The specific ideas and rhythms of those various great works filled Moby Dick as well as the Gettysburg Address, and even the modernistic books of Edgar Allen Poe and William Faulkner and many others. As long as I’m beating this dead horse, I’ll add that Chaim Potok, in the two-book novel The Chosen/The Promise, writes about the memorization of shelves of books by rabbinical seminarians (mostly likely including himself) who had to be able to move fluidly from one work to the middle of another to pass their oral exams.
Mind is both stuff and form. Memorization of “good stuff” provides the material to be shaped. A research mathematician, a Biblical exegete, a choreographer, or a cabinet-maker have a stock of “good stuff” in their minds.
There’s more and that more is of still greater importance. As I noted in the essay, New Forms of Human Mind and New Forms of Human Civilization:
Rich cultures make for rich opportunities for human minds to be shaped to encompass far more than the furniture and the trees, not that I despise solid and comfortable furniture or grand old trees.
But there’s a non-linear complexity involved in this business of cultures and minds. At any one slice of time, it seems to me that minds shape culture and culture tells minds how to move, to paraphrase John Wheeler [physicist and expert in general relativity].
About a month later, I published the essay, Differential Geometry and Moral Narratives, where I wrote:
The American physicist John Wheeler once summarized general relativity by telling us that matter tells space how to shape itself and space then tells matter how to move. Maybe we can play around with this metaphor:
“Human beings tell moral space how to shape itself and moral space then tells human beings how to move through life—how to act.”
The “good stuff” when we talk about moral spaces is rules of behavior and habits formed so that we may not even be consciously aware of them. Memories none the less. The “good stuff” for a mathematician is all those rules of differention and integration as well as proof techniques—a high-level expert in analysis (think of abstract calculus) would spend all his life on one complex proof if he hadn’t formed a lot of memories and instead had to develop that one proof from basic principles. In other terms, mathematical skills are not something separate from all those memorized equations from freshman calculus and woodworking skills are not something separate from those memorized properties of woods and of tools. In still other terms, mathematical skills and knowledge and complex skills and knowledge in general are cumulative, based upon prior skills and knowledge already held in the mind.
As I say in a novel not yet completed:
His memories were shaping his mind but his mind was telling his memories how to move along as if they were an orderly succession of events, though not so orderly as a half-hour television show with an obvious plot-line and a clean ending. His memories often hinted of a story, but not a story he always wanted to be part of.
It’s apparently hard for American educators to teach `facts’ without rigidifying the minds of their students. That’s a problem with American educators and their ways of teaching, more so a problem with the ways in which American children, including future teachers, are raised. I’ll leave that problem behind as I make a still more important point, at least within my understanding of being.
So many modern thinkers don’t see that the separation of facts (as in what’s memorized) and conceptualization (as in some alleged ability to apparently do something with the mind unformed by and empty of empirical reality), is a form of dualism which is less reasonable than a full-blown version in which creatures capable of moral reasoning (alas, more than just human beings) and abstract reasoning (alas, including at least chimpanzees) have some sort of immaterial entity capable of dealing with these immaterial concepts which are independent of thing-like being. In other words, pre-modern human beings thought facts and knowledge and understanding to be immaterial but they also thought they had immaterial minds or souls to handle this immaterial stuff. Modern thinkers are, in my opinion, less reasonable in positing immaterial facts and knowledge and understanding which is to be contained in the matter of the brain. How is protoplasm to contain ectoplasmic knowledge? I don’t know but I seem to be perhaps the only one to realize it is an overlooked question.
The human mind forms by way of response to its environments, including the abstract realms of created being such as mathematical spaces, which have been discovered mostly in recent centuries. At that, those abstract realms continue to be misunderstood even by great mathematicians and physicists and philosophers. Some artists and musicians and poets seem to have better understood the sheer reality of abstractions.
The biggest of all issues is involved here, the understanding of the nature of contingent being, “created being” to a Christian. As I said in Becoming Child-like in Our Thinking:
I’ve said often: created being, reality, is a manifestation of certain thoughts of God. We accept what we see as being true; things are true as St. Thomas Aquinas claimed. We have no warrant for a belief that we human animals know something outside of what we are told by way of the thing-like realm of being and the abstract realms of being we can begin to detect by studying that thing-like realm in greater detail and with greater sophistication. We are children learning from the Creator and shaping our thoughts in response to His answers. We’re not some sort of natural adults bringing schemes of truths to the task of understanding what lies around us. Any schemes we have are drawn out of our environments, concrete and abstract, by studying our traditions, and by that painful process of growing into a world, becoming truly part of it. We need to refound our Christian faith and we must do so by accepting on faith what is known of empirical reality and to move on to making sense of that knowledge in light of our Christian beliefs. As children take on faith the claims of their parents, we need to take on faith what God is telling us through His Creation.
Even more directly: a properly shaped human mind is an encapsulation of Creation, something of a complex and smeared image of the thoughts God manifested in created being. In shaping our minds to the thoughts of God, we are becoming truer images of the Almighty.