Posts tagged memory
Posts tagged memory
Recently I went to a commencement ceremony at the Greenhouse, a co-op of sorts for Christian homeschoolers here in Wheaton. Kids go to school there one day a week, and it provides a kind of a spine for their homeschooling curriculum. The commencement service consisted largely of children reciting things that they had memorized. For the younger children it might be a Bible verse; for the older children it got more and more ambitious, with the 14-year-olds reciting lengthy passages from Shakespeare. Someone did Richard II’s speech about weeping over the death of kings. Somebody did Portia’s “The quality of mercy is not strain’d.” Then there was a student who did one of Queen Elizabeth’s speeches, and another one who did John Donne’s “Meditation 17”: “No man is an island, entire of itself.” And at the end of it I thought, I don’t know that I’ve ever spent a more delightful hour at an official educational ceremony. By and large, the kids had internalized these wonderful words, and they were saying them with some conviction and understanding.
Those kids have been taught that to read is not just to scan their eyes across the page but to know it by heart, and then to speak it for others. (George Steiner, the literary scholar, is really good on that phrase, “to know something by heart,” which means more than being able to recite a text word-for-word.) That’s really reading. That’s the whole trajectory of the reading experience—taking the words in, knowing them by heart, and then bringing them forth again. It’s really beautiful to see.
Alan Jacobs
(Source: christianitytoday.com)
