Survivor: French Boarding School
Forget tests of endurance, ingenuity, or willingness to do gross stuff--how about tests of grammar, memorization? According to this New York Times article, the hot reality show in France places two dozen modern young people in a 1950s-style French boarding school. Everything is much as it would have been, with the exception of corporal punishment. (Guess there would be insurance problems around that.)
This is apparently sparking debate in France about what should be done in their school systems. (Can we get this show over here, pronto?) Most educators seem to have concluded (based on the NYT article--I haven't read the French papers on this yet) that although modern French kids know fewer facts, they are more likely to question and explore.
Which leads me to say a few words in defense of memorization.
By no means is the ability to recite facts knowledge; and the argument I always heard when I was growing up was that you could always look facts up. (Truer today than ever. You don't even have to get out of your chair to find out the capital of Botswana or the final score of the last game of the 1908 World Series or the value of pi to 28 places.) Nevertheless, having facts in your head gives context, and that is what leads to knowledge--someone tells you there was a flu pandemic in 1918 that spread throughout the world, and you will have a greater sense of how that might have happened if you remember that World War I was going on then, with unprecedented movement of large numbers of troops over multiple continents. Or, knowing that helium was only discovered on the Earth in about 1905 (its existence was deduced from solar spectra in 1869) makes the hot-air balloon photo of my old neighborhood taken in the 1880s all the more interesting. And at a more basic level, won't you enjoy a book more if you don't have to pause to look up the words in it to know what they mean?
Moreover, at least one study has shown that memorization techniques can help mitigate the memory-impairment effects of aging. Teaching kids memorization skills--by making them memorize things--may help them as they age.
New York City has an annual "Poem in Your Pocket" day, in which everyone is encouraged to have a poem at the ready to share with anyone else. I envy Rob: he's got a veritable anthology of poetry in his head. Leaves more room in the pockets for other stuff.
Me, I had to memorize and recite the Gettysburg address in fourth grade. I can still come up with the first half of it; the rest fades. I think I will go refresh my recollection of the rest of it.
This is apparently sparking debate in France about what should be done in their school systems. (Can we get this show over here, pronto?) Most educators seem to have concluded (based on the NYT article--I haven't read the French papers on this yet) that although modern French kids know fewer facts, they are more likely to question and explore.
Which leads me to say a few words in defense of memorization.
By no means is the ability to recite facts knowledge; and the argument I always heard when I was growing up was that you could always look facts up. (Truer today than ever. You don't even have to get out of your chair to find out the capital of Botswana or the final score of the last game of the 1908 World Series or the value of pi to 28 places.) Nevertheless, having facts in your head gives context, and that is what leads to knowledge--someone tells you there was a flu pandemic in 1918 that spread throughout the world, and you will have a greater sense of how that might have happened if you remember that World War I was going on then, with unprecedented movement of large numbers of troops over multiple continents. Or, knowing that helium was only discovered on the Earth in about 1905 (its existence was deduced from solar spectra in 1869) makes the hot-air balloon photo of my old neighborhood taken in the 1880s all the more interesting. And at a more basic level, won't you enjoy a book more if you don't have to pause to look up the words in it to know what they mean?
Moreover, at least one study has shown that memorization techniques can help mitigate the memory-impairment effects of aging. Teaching kids memorization skills--by making them memorize things--may help them as they age.
New York City has an annual "Poem in Your Pocket" day, in which everyone is encouraged to have a poem at the ready to share with anyone else. I envy Rob: he's got a veritable anthology of poetry in his head. Leaves more room in the pockets for other stuff.
Me, I had to memorize and recite the Gettysburg address in fourth grade. I can still come up with the first half of it; the rest fades. I think I will go refresh my recollection of the rest of it.
posted by Maines at 1:57 AM
1 Comments:
French vocab is certainly a good memory workout, but I also like the idea of having the Gettysburg address in my head; they're words I would like to be able to call upon at will. I've thought about trying to memorize parts of Lincoln's second inaugural address, too, as they are powerful and timeless words.
Similarly certain physics equations. I had a professor who never demanded we know equations, as we would always be able to look them up in real life. But in fact knowing equations means I can call up relationships between things without having to know to look something up to figure out whether there's a relationship (which of course leads to my occasional bouts of geekifying on the krav maga forum...).
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