Ars Memoria

Ars Memoria | John B. Buescher | CWR

Why would anyone think that
memorization is not a valuable part of learning?

In the 1960s, contrary to the inherited
wisdom of mankind, educators in general and Catholic educators, too,
decided that having students memorize things was a terrible notion.
If I recall, the thinking was that memorizing was a purely mechanical
operation, that it did not penetrate to the deep truth, and that it
turned out mindless robots who would uncharitably spew their mind
chaff out at opponents to distract them and protect them from being
caught by the truth.

Or something like that.

The fear of being “hypocritical”
was at work here—that great Calvinist weight that hung like an
albatross around the necks of the puritans and which they transferred
to their Progressive descendents who still demarcate the Elect and
the Damned based on worldly signs. Their acute awareness of the
difference between the outer man and the inner man made some of them
greatly aware of how debased is our state in this world, but also
made some of them greatly concerned with the evidentiary signs of
blessedness.

Some of them strove to align the inner
man with the outer one, even though they were convinced that not they
but God was the only one capable of that. Their modern Progressive
descendents gave up on that project as ultimately hopeless and
decided that the only way to achieve the alignment of the inner and
outer—to become “authentic”—was to erase the difference:
which meant accepting one’s unfashioned self not only as one’s
“natural” condition, but as one’s highest ideal. Indeed, it
sometimes seems that for Progressives “hypocrisy” is not only the
greatest sin, but perhaps the only one. It certainly seems sometimes
like the only one they are interested in convicting others of.

That affected the modern view of
pedagogy (as it did liturgical ad libbers, seeking “authenticity”).
Even losers began to receive awards because they were “great” in
and of themselves. It was reminiscent of the way in which declaring
oneself already “saved” somehow was warped to mean that no one
had to make any effort at holiness as a result.

Before, the problem was finding the
best way to bring an unformed being into alignment with the highest
wisdom offered by culture. But after Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s
ludicrously unrealistic picture of pedagogy in Émile, this
was reversed: the “highest wisdom” of the culture was judged as
a sham and a debasement that created and protected hypocrites, and
the pedagogical mission came to be seen as the destruction of that
culture in the child, so that the authentic inner man—the noble
savage—could flourish.

“Rote memorization” was a
foundational pillar of the older pedagogy, so it had to go, along
with all other methods of instilling into the child the conventional
formulations of wisdom.

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