Over the last half-dozen years, classical educators’ recovery of a more holistic practice of memory has permeated my own understanding of learning, pedagogy, and virtue. I have come to believe that what a student has learned is revealed in what she remembers, rather than what work she has done or what experiences she has collected […]
“Ivan Ilych saw that he was dying, and he was in continual despair.” – Leo Tolstoy, “The Death of Ivan Ilych”
Our era is dismantling millennia of incarnated memories with increasing fervor and speed—“old” books are considered irrelevant, so much so that it can be difficult to find classics in local libraries or school curricula; monuments and artistic creations, some of which have withstood the ravages of decades, if not centuries, are toppled in the name
On the last day of class, I read the following letter aloud to my seniors—students with whom I’d shared 9th, 11th, and 12th grade literature, composition, and rhetoric classes.
The Use of Memory: A Farewell Letter to the Senior Class Read More »
Further thoughts for cultivating a culture of memory, this time in the classroom: Repeat important things monthly, weekly, daily. Last year my students read Aquinas’s Student’s Prayer at the beginning of class on the first day of each school week, and by the end of the year, all of them could say it by heart.
8 Ideas for Cultivating a Culture of Memory in the Classroom Read More »
To practice memorization without cultivating a culture of memory is like planting a rosebush in sand. All the water in the world will not bring it to flourishing, for the soil in which it’s planted simply cannot sustain it. The memory of the modern West is similarly arid. The forward-focused euphoria of progress and innovation,
9 Ideas for Cultivating a Culture of Memory at Home Read More »
“Memory is the cabinet of imagination, the treasury of reason, the registry of conscience, the counsel-chamber of thought”: these words, quoted at last month’s CiRCE conference, have continued to percolate in my reflections on what I heard there, helping to rehabilitate the very word “memory” from its eroded modern definition—the mere storing of information, accomplished
“Cogito ergo sum.” These famous words from the philosopher René Descartes summarize his view, or maybe his thought experiment, on how we know. For Descartes, knowledge is knowledge if it originates in the thinker. Any knowledge that originates outside of the thinker must be doubted, questioned, examined, and reasoned by the thinker so as to
