How boring!
Who likes to memorize? Everyone always talks about how hard it is. But if you read Little House on the Prairie books or Tom Sawyer or Elsie Dinsmore, that was what they did. Every lesson was memorized. Laura Ingalls Wilder didn’t actually write a single thing until she was sixteen years old. It wasn’t required.
The basis of Western education for over a thousand years was the Trivium, meaning, where three roads meet. Those consisted of the the Grammar (Memorizing), the Dialectic (Logic) and Rhetoric (Speaking or teaching). We are going to focus on the foundation: Grammar.
Whether it is a child or a subject, if you skip the Grammar/Memorizing skills and principles, you will never progress beyond it. Children are wired to be champion memorizers from before age 5 to about age 11. But if they practice memorizing a lot, their brain actually forms more connections so that they memorize even better! Every subject has its Grammar, or foundation principles and you cannot proceed in that subject unless you have learned them.
I once worked with a 10 year old for three weeks on memorizing a single verse in Awana. She ought to have been at the tail end of the Grammar phase of development, about to start the Dialectic/Logic phase. Not having learned to memorize at a young age (thank you, public schools), the synaptic pathways had not been formed and she was almost incapable of memorizing. She was not prepared to learn any kind of logic.
Dorothy Sayers, friend and fellow teacher of Tolkein and C.S. Lewis, in her essay, “Discovering the Lost Tools of Learning,” advises that you have your 6-12 year olds memorize.
Anything.
Bible verses, nursery rhymes, dinosaur names, the Periodic Table of Elements, the Gettysburg Address, the days of the week, anything. It forges pathways in the brain and makes learning Dialectic/Logic and Rhetoric/Teaching possible.
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