The Meaning of Memorization
4th March 2023
The best case for memorisation is not pedagogical. Rather, it is about what it means to be fully human, and how we can make ourselves members of a continuing civilisation rather than a load of individual units who happen to briefly be in the same place at the same time.
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If you don’t furnish your own mind, someone else will do it for you, probably without your even noticing. Nature abhors a vacuum. If your mind is not full of fragments of poetry, passages from plays and the melodies of the great composers, it will be filled with the half-witted slogans of contemporary politics, the canting jargon of frauds and grifters, and the banal pop music of your youth.