Horizon

Nitpick: I know what you're getting at, but isn't it a bit odd to put Gibbon in a 19th Century context?

I agree that the overall tone of the piece is pompous and overstated, but I wish I'd been given some rote memorization of poetry at school. Considering how much worthless pop junk I carry around in my head, it would be nice to think that the effort had been put into something more productive. Anyway, I'll probably experiment with this a little on my son when he gets older; that should give him one more reason to dislike me.

There I go again getting my dates mixed up. Thanks for the catch, although in my defense I did say "Edward Gibbon-style" which, though inelegant, does let me off the hook just a little?

When I was growing up I used to memorize poems and whole episodes of The Prisoner (yes, it's true, I could recite "The Chimes of Big Ben", as well as about five other episodes, in their entirety). I think it improves a person's memory and mental concentration somewhat. If my kid had the temperament for it I would certainly encourage it.

I memorized Tom Lehrer's "The Elements" for a school variety show around 1983 and have been making myself unpopular with it ever since, so the rote stuff isn't necessarily all that.

It often does seem to happen that a City Journal "fellow" will proceed by conflating dissimilar strands of thought and pretending that they can't be separated. We've got several questions getting jammed together here, and a civilized analysis would separate them:
- Does it advance learning to memorize things by rote?
- Will kids memorize valuable prose or poetry that they like on their own if not required to do so in school?
- Are "inner-city kids" different in this regard? (...and how different does this fellow think "inner-city kids" are from kids in general?)
- What constitutes valuable prose or poetry?
- What ought Kids Today to memorize?
- Do things memorized under coercion have the same value as things memorized by choice?

BTW you'll recall it was George Orwell's opinion that Greek grammar could not be learned without corporal punishment. Perhaps City Journal would like to give that theory a whirl next week. It'd be quite in their line.

After that it'll be the benefits of the skimpy porridge-and-gruel diet for slimming down overweight "inner-city kids"... pass the partridges, would you, Jeeves?

What most sticks in my craw about such articles is that they proudly marshal highly notional theories from other elitists while ignoring any actual research that might complicate their argument. Is this the fruit of a classical education, that you think you can prove educational theories through rhetoric and good punctuation?

And he uses that classic debating move, "B is actually more A than A is, because..." It's getting to the point I groan every time I run across that one. In fact, I've seen it somewhere else lately, but I can't remember where.

Now that's going to bother me all day.

Alan, I think that for a lot of these "scholars", their research is limited to what is available on the net.

I think Stumpy's got it right: if those folks were as much scholars as they are propagandists, they wouldn't stoop to phony methods of argument.

I've recommended the "Fallacious Appeals" section of the SJSU Critical Thinking workbook before but it's just so concisely useful as an aid to shit-detection. I think I'm gonna go make sure it's on my weblog now.

You could, of course, make the argument that knowing all the words to a pop song - or Lehrer's Elements, or a musical - *is* rote learning and a good exercise of memory. The problem is it isn't learning what a particular cultural group believes to be worthy.

(the only thing I learn by rote was a Shakespeare speech when I was 11 - I can still recite it over 20 years later)

That's a good point, and one surely intentional consequence of the author conflating several distinct claims. Classic dirty debating tactic; then when an objection is brought you can switch to whichever claim is most useful to you.

You can also turn the tactic around, which results in the good old slippery slope: if you don't think classical lit is essential you are coddling criminals. Etc., etc.

David Horowitz does this (and also the B more A than A) all the time, and he used to be regular at the NY Times.

But all that stuff seems to work often enough or presumably it wouldn't be so popular.

The Skeptic's Dictionary is also a useful reference.

I was partly thinking of kids I've heard reciting rap lyrics -- sometimes including political ideas -- at great length. I wonder in part whether the Manhattan Institute wants to advocate memorization in general or only the memorization of words it finds improving.

Dunno about that Skeptic's Dictionary -- I took a look at the A's and it was sneering at acupuncture. True, there may be exaggerated claims made for specific types of acupuncture, but it's a part of the rigorous and widely trusted discipline of Chinese medicine and hardly belongs in the same bin as alien abduction hooey.

The Skeptic's Dictionary takes the scientific view of the world to a new level of austerity. Still, I would rather have something like acupuncture included, which although many claim it to be efficacious in some cases, is also indisputably a practice liable to quackery.

Don't know whether you read that entry or not, but it looks to me like a pretty fair introduction to the subject. The author criticizes its defenders as committing the "Pragmatic Fallacy", which seems to be a particularly controversial fallacy. But as I understand it, the "It works, it must be true" argument is currently the only available to defenders of acupuncture. Is that incorrect?

I find myself sometimes disagreeing with the site, but I don't consider that a bad thing. It's consistent with its principles and you know you will always get the best argument against anything unscientific, which I consider to be a useful service.