What Have We Lost?!

Education has changed over the years. My mother - who started her teaching career in a one-room country school in 1939 - valued good penmanship. In her later years, she often complained that children nowadays learned printing, but not neat cursive writing.

My handwriting wasn't all that legible, so I didn't share her concern... My educational regret was that memorizing poetry wasn't part of the school curriculum anymore. My life had been enriched by the poetry I had memorized - and could still recite - and the psalms I had been challenged to memorize in Sunday School.

But I didn't think we had really lost anything - education had simply changed. That was all...

But I may be wrong. The book on recent brain discoveries that I'm currently reading (The Brain that Changes Itself) says that the brain can be exercised like a muscle. What exercise benefits it? It turns out the cursive writing and memory work are two that do!

In the chapter entitled "Building Herself a Better Brain" Dr. Doidge writes that "... for hundreds of years educators did seem to sense that children's brains had to be built up through exercises of increasing difficulty that strengthened brain functions. Up through the nineteenth and early  twentieth centuries a classical education often included rote memorization of long poems in foreign languages, which strengthened the auditory memory (hence thinking in language) and an almost fanatical attention to handwriting, which probably helped strengthen motor capacities and thus not only helped handwriting but added speed and fluency to reading and speaking... Then in the 1960s educators dropped such traditional exercises from the curriculum... But the loss of these drills has been costly; they may have been the only opportunity that many students had to systematically exercise the brain function that gives us fluency and grace with symbols. For the rest of us, their disappearance may have contributed to the general decline of eloquence, which requires memory and a level of auditory brain power unfamiliar to us now."