We live in an era where almost anything can be looked up online.
Dates. Definitions. Poems. Historical events. Foreign language. Mathematical equations. The names of kings, rivers, saints, battles and constellations.
A child with a gadget in his hands has access to more information than the greatest libraries of antiquity could hold in them combined.
And yet, I’m becoming increasingly convinced that memorisation is more necessary in this era than ever before.
For decades now, memorisation has been treated as an embarrassment of an earlier educational era. “Children don’t need to memorise anything,” we’re told, “because they can look up whatever they want.” What’s really necessary now, supposedly, is that they learn how to think.
But thinking does not occur in a vacuum.
We can’t reason about things we haven’t learned about or make connections about ideas we’ve never met.
We can’t spot an allusion we don’t understand, or immerse ourselves in the depth of a poem in a foreign language, or debate history when it has only existed somewhere on the internet.
Knowledge first must become ours.
And this requires memory.
Education is more than providing access to information
There is a huge difference between having access to knowledge and actually owning it.
I can own a library of cookery books and still be unable to cook.
I can own a map and still have no sense of direction.
I can have the entire history of England accessible via my smartphone but lack any real understanding of how Alfred the Great, Thomas Becket, Henry VIII, the English Civil War and the Industrial Revolution fit together.
Information that lives elsewhere is useful, but it is not yet knowledge.
The aim of education has never been to give children access to facts. It is to furnish their mind, to fill it with language, stories, ideas, images, prayers, dates, names and principles from which reasoning would follow.
The classical tradition knew this very well.
The Grammar stage of education is not called Grammar merely because students spend days parsing sentences. It is the stage in which we give children the vocabulary of the world.
They learn names, stories, chronology, numbers, facts, poetry, geography and scripture.
They begin accumulating the information that later reasoning will require.
Before the child can form any opinions about whether King John was a good king, he first needs to know who King John was.
Before he can draw parallels between the causes of the English Civil War and the French Revolution, he needs to know that both events happened, who took part in them and where these events stand in history relative to one another.
Before he can talk about Shakespeare’s works, he needs to accumulate the sufficient knowledge of language, history and imagination to understand them.
Memory provides reason something to reason about.
The mind needs furniture
There is a tendency in modern education to separate knowledge and thinking.
We say that children must learn “critical thinking skills” instead of memorising facts, but critical thinking is not some detached skill that can be practised without knowledge.
An educated mind is not an empty room equipped with excellent analytical gear.
It is a room full of furniture, poems and proverbs, kings and queens, Saints and sinners.
It houses Latin roots, Mathematical relationships, Biblical narratives, Lines of Shakespeare and the geography of the world.
And when Homer’s stories, hymns sung at Mass, the names of birds in the garden and ideas discussed at the family dinner table come to this room, the educated mind has a place to put them.
They can be compared and evaluated, they are placed in context and connected.
This is how an intellectual life builds.
A child who has accumulated the broad outline of British history instantly gets a place for a new story to fit in. A child who memorised poems begins to recognize poetic rhythms and images in literature. A child who knows Scripture starts noticing references to it in art, music and language around him.
Knowledge starts talking to knowledge.
This is one of the pleasures of classical education.
The world starts becoming more interconnected.
Google can’t think for you
One of the great promises of the digital age is that we no longer need to remember because the information is available online.
But searching and knowing are not the same thing.
You can search for the date of the Battle of Hastings, and knowing that it is in 1066, allows you to put other things around it.
Then you begin to understand that the Anglo-Saxon era came before it and Norman England came after it. You get the place of William the Conqueror. You start realizing why castles started appearing all over the English landscape. You make connections between the Norman aristocracy and the future developments in the English language, law and monarchy.
One memorised fact provides many other facts a place to hang onto.
A child who has to constantly stop what he is doing to search for every piece of information cannot easily see the whole. His thoughts fragment into a continual cycle of searching, reading and forgetting. Memorised knowledge, in contrast, is instantly accessible to the imagination.
It accompanies us in conversations, and while reading a novel, we can recall it when visiting a cathedral, a castle or listening to a homily.
What we memorise shapes our love
But there is a deeper reason why I’m concerned about memorisation, because education is not only about producing intelligent people, it’s about forming human beings.
What we place in a child’s memory becomes part of his inner world.
This is why, for centuries, children were asked to memorise things worthy of remembering.
Poetry, Prayers, Psalms, Songs, Beautiful speeches, Great stories.
We sometimes talk about memorisation as if it means forcing children to memorise endless lists of unrelated facts.
It can mean that, if educators are not curating what is being memorised carefully.
But that’s not what memorisation has to be.
At its best, memory is a treasury in which a child can accumulate beautiful poems and prayers, meaningful stories and words recited at the family dinner table.
This is knowledge that goes beyond being information, it becomes part of a human being.
Memory and the Catholic imagination
Especially for Catholic families, this is relevant, our Faith is deeply incarnational, we do not separate body and soul.
We remember, repeat, and commemorate our human experiences.
The liturgical year takes us again and again back to the great events of salvation history. We learn prayers in the Church till they become automatic. We hear familiar passages of Scripture. We say responses. We memorise the Creed.
Not because repetition opposes understanding but because repetition deepens it.
A four-year-old may learn by heart words “I believe in one God” before he understands the doctrine of divine simplicity.
It doesn’t make his learning useless, it aids in his growing into a deeper knowledge down the line.
This is the case with education in general.
Children often learn things before they completely understand them.
Later on, understanding catches up with memory, which in turn becomes enlightened.
The poem memorised at seven years old becomes meaningful at seventeen.
The Gospel story heard at five years old reveals another layer at fifteen.
The historical figure learned as a name on a timeline becomes, years later, a part of the bigger argument about kingship, freedom, law or conscience.
Classical education trusts this process.
We provide children with things worth learning before they exhaust their meanings.
Memorisation is not the enemy of wonder
Sometimes memorisation is set against joyful education. You either can have a sense of wonder, we’re told, or drills.
Living books or facts.
Imagination or memory.
But this is a false dichotomy.
Children often enjoy memorising things. They enjoy rhythm, repetition and mastery.
Anyone who has listened to a child repeating for the hundredth time the same story, poem or rhyme knows it. We have all watched a toddler repeat the same skill over and over again until they master it.
This is what makes the Grammar Stage so precious, it corresponds with a developmental stage in which children often love to repeat and memorise. Think of the little boys that will learn about 14 different kinds of dinosaurs and their identifying features and habitats. The big question isn’t will they memorise but rather what will we give them to memorise.
Advertising slogans?
YouTube memes?
Fragments of popular music learned through algorithms?
Or poems, prayers, history, Scripture, number facts, beautiful language and the great stories of our civilization?
The classical tradition does not make children memorise because we want their education to be dry.
We make them memorise because we want their imagination to be rich.
Knowledge does not kill wonder it provides names for it.
Attention is getting rarer and rarer
Which is another reason why memorisation matters in the digital age, it helps develop attention.
To memorise something, we have to stay with it, repeat it and listen to it carefully.
You have to go back to it tomorrow.
The modern digital world tends to push us into the exact opposite direction, scroll, click, switch, refresh, watch. Passively consume without ever absorbing or really taking in anything you have just read or seen.
Memorisation asks from a child something very countercultural:
Stay here for a little while and listen attentively, watch carefully, soak it all in and then repeat the process.
This is not merely an academic exercise.
Attention is one of the great human abilities that almost everything depends upon.
Prayer requires attention.
Friendship requires attention.
Reading requires attention.
Music requires attention.
Wonder requires attention.
Love requires attention.
Training children in paying attention is therefore much more important than helping them pass an exam.
We’re teaching them how to be present to reality.
A reality in which they are free to act independently because they do not have to rely on a constant stream of input to be able to act.
The pianist who knows scales in his memory is free to play.
The writer who has a rich vocabulary is free to express himself.
The speaker who knows his subject is free to think on his feet.
The child who memorised the foundation of his faith is better prepared to understand and articulate it later on.
Knowledge memorised frees the mind from the burden of basic facts.
This is why the classical stages depend upon each other.
Grammar gives us the knowledge. Logic teaches us to examine and organize it. Rhetoric teaches us to present it beautifully and persuasively.
Take away the first stage, and the others become weirdly hollow.
We can’t skip straight to wisdom. First, we must provide the mind with the knowledge worth becoming wise about.
And information is not wisdom.
Our children still need minds filled with knowledge.
Imagination filled with beautiful things.
Memory filled with things worth remembering.
They need knowledge that enables reasoning, stories that help them understand humanity, poetry that teaches them to love language, and prayers that teach them where to direct their hearts.
We’re not educating our children for the sake of the next search query.
We’re forming human beings who sooner or later will have to face the world without us by their side.
So, let’s give them something to carry.
Let it be a line of poetry or a verse of scripture, a date or a song.
A truth learned so well that it becomes impossible to forget.
In the era when we’re able to store anything anywhere else, perhaps the most revolutionary thing we can do is to teach our children to carry something beautiful inside themselves.