CHAPTER XIII

MEMORY WORK

In recent years the cultivation of the memory has been greatly discredited by the pedagogical neophytes. They have argued for "learning by thinking" as against "learning by remembering" so vigorously that those who clung to the conservatism of early days were effectually silenced. Drill work was sneered at; it was said to be a mind-cramming process and not an educative one. Training for memory, which formerly existed in the school, dropped almost entirely into disuse. The "literary society" became a reminiscence; the Friday afternoon exercise was abandoned because it did not train in thought power. Almost every thing that emphasized the storing of the mind with useful information has been ridiculed.

A few "old-fashioned schoolmasters" quietly pursued these methodical ways of furnishing the mind with some of the choice things of literature. The educational pendulum began finally to swing back, and now it wavers mid-way between the extremes of memory and thought, of cramming and development. The most recent books dealing with the problem are urging the necessity of harking back to the

good old days when children learned something, were masters of something, could repeat something, had facts stored and available for use.

In no field is the demand for this backward swing and forward movement stronger than in reading. In Huey's "Psychology and Pedagogy of Reading" the tendency of the day is indicated in very plain language. "Accordingly, in the books by Miss. Taylor, Miss Arnold, and other successful primer writers, teachers are urged to make much of memorizing poems, especially as an excellent means of learning to read. Songs are readily learned and read in this way."

As long ago as 1869, President Eliot urged committing to memory choice bits of literature to aid in learning the mother-tongue. The Committee of Ten advocated the introduction of memory gems from the third grade on, but there seems to be no good reason why they should not be introduced in the first two.

The mental vacuity of children was clearly demonstrated by Professor C. Alphonso Smith, when at the University of North Carolina. He secured returns from his freshman class and found that 38 per cent. of them had never been required to do any memorizing in their preparatory course. Thirtyfive per cent. confessed that they could not repeat a single selection.* The present methods of education, so far as storing the mind with valuable

*Educa. R. 12, 224.