Digital technology has convinced us that memory is the purview of machines; that to remember facts and data are nothing more than parlor tricks, tricks that can be safely left to the digital cloud to safeguard for us while we attend to more significant things, such as critical thinking and creative expression. As a result, recitation and memorisation have fallen out of favor within education. Classical education is, in part, an attempt to reclaim these practices.
Recently, digital culture critic L.M. Sacasas suggested that drinking from the digital stream is like drinking from the waters of Lethe—that ancient forgetfulness-inducing river of the underworld. Sacasas argues that our outsourcing of memory has also propelled us into an “existential state of forgetfulness” as we have pretended that no difference exists between “what we know by heart and what we merely know how to access.”
The phrase “knowing by heart,” indicating something that has been committed to memory, perhaps is the place to start in redeeming memory in education. The heart, after all, drives what we pursue and attend to, what we value and adore.
To know something “by heart” should be an exercise in forming and shaping desire: what is loved and pursued.
Classical education discerns the intrinsic ability of children to remember—to soak up facts and commit them to memory—and focuses the Grammar stage of education on this ability by teaching students to identify and name. The identifying and naming, of course, can easily become a dry exercise, or, worse, an abstract compendium of facts that lack flesh and blood (perhaps here we might make Thamus’s distinction between memory and recollection). This is why the imagination is a key focus of the Grammar stage, as the imagination is nurtured through rich stories of good and evil, beauty and ugliness, truth and deception; and ample time for unhurried observation of the child’s world. These practices help to form hearts that love God’s world and the people he has made, and to be prepared to find their place in it.
This preparation is key, because without memory, as much as we may value critical thinking and creative expression, we will be drawing from dry wells. I tell my writing students, if you want to write well, you need to be a good reader, because the more you read, the more you fill your own well of creativity. The exercise of memory expands our wells beyond our own experience and observation, filling it with the experiences and wisdom of those in the past.
Alan Jacobs, in his book How to Think, insists that “thinking is necessarily, thoroughly, and wonderfully social. Everything you think is a response to what someone else has thought and said.” This community of thinking is not only a present community, but a past one, as well—to think well is to think in the company of the men and women who have come before us. To remember their stories and their words and experiences is to enlarge our own capacity for thinking well—for exercising the critical thinking that a liberal society values.
Classical education typically seeks to remember a particular culture: Western culture as inherited from the Ancient Greeks and Romans. This is a contentious goal, and not without good reason. The fruit of Western culture has not always been good, and it has produced bad fruit particularly when the West has been idealized.
This objection to classical education is the one I encounter the most, perhaps because it is not an intellectual objection as much as it is a moral objection. How can we, I hear people ask, perpetuate a culture that has done so much harm?
Memory, I think, is the answer to this question.
To seek to pass on Western culture is a practice of preserving memory. We preserve the past because it matters, because it has shaped us and our world. Only in understanding where we have come from, who and what has led us to this moment in history, can we understand who we are and have a context for who we might be.
In doing so, we must remember the bad along with the good fruit. Too often attempts to tell the stories of the past are attempts to ennoble our history, to create a sense of national pride, and to inflate our sense of importance on the world’s stage. But to remember the past in a way that elides serious moral failing is not an exercise in memory, but an exercise in propaganda and distortion that will give us a false image of ourselves and of others, and preclude our ability to diagnose present cultural ailments.
Claiming memory as a critical piece of identity and wholeness also provides the imperative to preserve and pass on more than Western culture. If understanding the West is important for me to understand myself, how can I not affirm the same about my non-Western friends? In fact, to do the opposite, to purposefully engage in actions that erase cultural and linguistic memories, as so much of colonialism did, causes an identity crisis that limits a person’s ability to flourish. Classical education contradicts itself if it declares that only Western culture is worth remembering.
And when I view myself as human, first and foremost, rather than as a white, Western woman, then classical education allows me not only to value the preserving of cultural memory for others, but to see those cultural memories as important and relevant for me as well, to enlarge my understanding of the human experience. As C.S. Lewis memorably argues, “In reading great literature I become a thousand men and yet remain myself. Like the night sky in the Greek poem, I see with a myriad eyes, but it is still I who see. Here, as in worship, in love, in moral action, and in knowing, I transcend myself; and am never more myself than when I do.”
L.M. Sacasas suggests that remembering is the opposite of dismembering— that “‘to remember’ is to piece back together again—perhaps the self, perhaps the soul.” In today’s dis-integrated society, in which we are pulled away from our families, our neighbors, our community, and even from our own selves, to re-member has become an urgent need. An education that seeks to do such re-membering work through the cultivation of memory is an education worth having.