H2Ohhhhh

Home

Two Arms To Arms

Old-Fashioned Education

Posted by Arwen Mosher in Family on Friday, September 05, 2008 3:30 PM

Like I mentioned last week, I’m working my way through the Little House books.  One thing I’m noticing is this: education sure was different back then.

On the first day that Laura and Carrie go to school in their new town in The Long Winter, the teacher reads the twenty-third psalm to start the day.  “Of course Laura knew all the psalms by heart,” the text says, and my eyebrows shot up.  Of course she knew all the psalms by heart?  At thirteen years of age?  Wow!

In the next book, Little Town on the Prairie, Pa takes Laura and Carrie to the Fourth of July celebration in town, and there’s a reading of the Declaration of Independence.  “Of course” the girls know that by heart too!

It’s been a few years since I graduated, but I remember my school days pretty well.  I certainly never knew the Declaration of Independence by heart, let alone all the psalms, and I was much better at memorization than most of my classmates.

In fact, I took an English class in college in which the professor required that we memorize a poem and recite it for her in her office.  The poem had to be at least forty lines long, and it seemed I was the only one of my classmates who did not think this was an enormous burden.  Many of them had never been required to memorize anything before!

It seems that memorization is out of vogue in education today, and I’m not sure what to think about that.  On one hand, it’s true that memorizing something is not the same as understanding it, and rote memorization might not help to expand children’s minds.

On the other hand, memorization is certainly good discipline, and in many cases it is a prerequisite to using the understanding you have.  I certainly could not have passed a single physics test in high school and college, no matter how well I understood the material, if I hadn’t also bothered to memorize the formulas!

I guess part of me wishes that I’d had a more memorization-heavy education.  It sure would be nice to be able to recite all the psalms.  On the other hand (there sure are a lot of hands in this post!), Laura Ingalls writes about being fourteen or fifteen and still doing fractions and long division. 

When I was fifteen, I was studying trigonometry, in preparation for the calculus I would take when I was sixteen.  In high school alone, I studied biology, chemistry, physics, and Advanced Placement (college-level) biology and chemistry, all of them with labs.  My mathematical and scientific education was incredible compared to what Laura Ingalls got.  So modern education does have its benefits.

Based on your own experiences or experiences with your kids, what do you think?  Is it too bad that we don’t have old-fashioned memorization-heavy education anymore?  Or are we better off without it?

 Print Blog   Email a Friend   

Post a Comment

By submitting this form, you give Faith And Family Magazine permission to publish this comment. Comments will be published at our discretion, and may be edited for clarity and length. For best formatting, please limit your response to one paragraph and don't hit "enter" to force line breaks.

H2Ohhhhh

Home

Two Arms To Arms