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Marita Moll This article first appeared in Our Schools/ Our Selves, vol. 15, no. 2, Winter 2005, and is reprinted with permission of the author.
I’m writing this on the eve of Remembrance Day in the Year of the Veteran. I am seized by the moment to think about the act of remembering. I remember that last year on Remembrance Day, I was meeting with an informal German language conversation group. At 11 a.m. we held a two-minute silence. Then spontaneously, a senior member of the group, in somewhat accented English, recited all verses of "In Flanders Fields" so flawlessly and so movingly that it was hard to hold back the tears. There was such heartbreaking beauty and irony in that moment. I grew up with that poem and have always been moved by it. But I wouldn’t be able to get beyond the first few lines without prompting and I wonder if either of my (now grown) children would do any better.
It is well known that the older we get, the more likely we are to recall things from the distant past at the expense of things that happened yesterday. But the problem is, there has to be something in the distant past that we once knew well enough to have lodged it in our memory bank. And in my case, as I fear is the case for much of the post-war baby boom generation, there simply isn’t a great storehouse of banked wisdom to draw on. When I went to school, memorization had become outmoded. We memorized the odd passage from a Shakespearean play, the occasional poem, but I didn’t consider it a good use of study time. What were encyclopaedias for if not to look things up when you needed them?
Ah, the arrogance of youth! Now, many years later I am regretting that attitude. I know I’ll never be able to perform astonishing memory feats like my 92-year-old neighbour, who is a fountain of quotes from Bartletts to the Bible. Recently, twigged by some comment on French–English relations, she regaled me with a full verse of the French national anthem— La Marseillaise :
Aux armes, citoyens!
Formez vos bataillons!
Marchons, marchons!
Qu’un sang impur...
Abreuve nos sillons! 1
(etc.)
Funny thing is, she doesn’t speak French. But I do—and for the most part, she had the words right. How did she do that? Must have learned it sometime in the past, was the only explanation available. I wonder if the mental gymnastics that she and others of her generation would have practised at school are what’s keeping her so lucid now at such an advanced age.
Long-term memory proficiency is not the same as a knack for "cramming"—that well-known student capacity to memorize an entire course overnight, spew it out, and forget it by lunch. Long-term memory differs structurally from short-term memory. Recent scientific research has shown that the brain has a specific mechanism to transfer short-term memories into permanent storage. It appears to involve a system of replaying and reinforcing the same event to create the explicit connections that constitute long-term memory. Some researchers have even isolated a particular protein related to long-term memory functions. You can’t force the activation of long-term memory with arbitrary rote memorization and mandatory recitation. There has to be some personal commitment to the process. Actors and musicians know about this. If you lose the flow during a performance you risk finding yourself at a mortifying dead stop before an assembled audience. The flow is achieved through constant, constant repetition over a long period of time. In fact the French word for rehearsal is exactly that— répétition . There is nothing fast about it. It is hard work and the motivation has to be there.
Active reinforcement of long-term memory skills really seems to have little or no profile in education today. It is not listed on any measure of educational outcomes. There is no standardized test to tell us whether Grade 6 students in Alberta or Ontario have acquired such skills. Yet, in the new "information society" we appear to be constructing, we may want to think about returning to some of the skills practised by earlier generations, not just in our own self-interest but in the collective interest of the social experiment called democracy.
Educator and author Heather Menzies points out, in her recent book No Time, that citizens need good memory skills. You can’t just google "functioning democracy" and expect to come up with the name of the best person or policy to vote for. "Memory, or at least the retention of information, is crucial to...critical thinking, in both its aspects: The broad range of personal experience, chance observations and overheard chat, plus the deeper wells of accumulated and composted knowledge, wise nuggets and one-liners against which we test new information, sensing contradictions and resisting accepting the latest idea or news flash simply because it is new," says Menzies. 2
It is possible that the current generation of school leavers, those who have grown up with computers and the internet at their fingertips, have an even more tenuous relationship with long-term memory skills than do their parents. In the digital world, there is almost no need to have any answers in your head. So what does that do to our own internal thinking processes? Are the next generations destined forever to be information grazers that never reach the fields of knowledge? As early as 1995, editor and literary critic Sven Birkerts recognized the impending danger and wondered if the cognitive response to information overload might be "an expansion of the short-term memory banks and a correlative atrophying of long-term memory." 3
Long-term memory requires practice, practice requires repetition, and repetition requires time. And Menzies has it right—we have no time. Birkerts offers a sobering scenario of our possible future in a world of too much information and not enough time:
Once it dawns on us, as it must, that our software will hold all the information we need at ready access, we may very well let it. That is, we may choose to become the technicians of our auxiliary brains, mastering not the information but the retrieval and referencing functions. At a certain point, then, we could become the evolutionary opposites of our forebears, who, lacking external technology, committed everything to memory. If this were to happen, what would be the status of knowing, of being educated? The leader of the electronic tribe would not be the person who knew most, but the one who could execute the broadest range of technical functions. What, I hesitate to ask, would become of the already antiquated notion of wisdom?
Technicians to our own machines? When you think about the numerous machines that enslave our daily lives (computers, cell phones and blackberries), it’s not so far fetched. And, over the last 10 years, schools have become part of the enabling process. Schools have been inundated with propaganda about the need to be part of the information age. So, now we teach Grade 3 students how to keyboard so that they can have better technical skills but we don’t give them the time it would take to have a deeper understanding of the world around them. We offer high school students the technical skills to build a website but not the critical skills to understand why much of the world lives in abject poverty. 4
Information age or age of amnesia? Birkert’s "electronic tribe" is closer than we think. Perhaps it’s time to regain control of the machines by periodically turning them off. Then we could spend that time practising life without their constant prompting. I expect this could be a serious challenge to most of us—myself included. Maybe we could use an anthem…
Aux armes, citoyens !
Fermez vos machines!
Marchons, marchons!
Contre la techno
Qui nous abrutit! 5
Marita Moll is an Ottawa writer and member of the Our Schools/ Our Selves editorial board.
Footnotes
1 Trans: To arms, citizens; Form your battalions; March, march; Let impure blood; Water our furrows.
2 Menzies, H. 2005. No Time . Toronto: Douglas & McIntyre. p186.
3 Birkerts, Sven. 1995. The Gutenberg Elegies; The Fate of Reading in an Electronic Age . New York: Faber & Faber.
4 ibid
5 Trans: To arms, citizens; Turn off your machines; March, march; Against the technologies; That make us dumb!
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