Pupils across much of the UK are in the last week of revision for GCSEs, but is
learning off by heart still a practised and valued skill, asks Neil Hallows.
The Dickens character Thomas Gradgrind ensured his pupils had "imperial gallons
of facts poured into them until they were full to the brim". There are those
who despise his methods, but would still like to borrow his measuring jug.
GCSEs and A-levels tend to include non-exam elements like coursework,
supervised assessments, and extended essays, as well as exams spread over a
period of study. Some say this makes the experience more lightweight, others
that it tests pupils' level of understanding in a more rounded way.
Common ground can be hard to find, but here is a striking point of consensus.
There are millions on either side of the educational debate who cannot even
remember their online banking details.
Students could be forgiven for asking why they have to cram such subjects as
glaciation and inert gases when as soon as they put their pens down in the exam
hall for the last time, they no longer have to remember anything - even short,
useful pieces of information.
Memory feats
works of Shakespeare and 12,000 books
We know even less than we think we do. We start Auld Lang Syne and My Way with
a confident roar, then find the second verse as elusive as our audience.
But does it matter? It's the information age, remember, and if it's all on a
phone or a computer, does it need to be in our heads?
There are plenty who need not just a pretty good processor in their heads but
plenty of Ram too. They are in professions like medicine or law, the study for
which is compared to learning a whole new language, and many others we might
take for granted.
London black-cab drivers need a detailed knowledge of a six-mile radius of
Charing Cross station. They learn 320 routes, and all the landmarks and places
of interest along the way. The process can take three to five years, and
dropout rates are said to be around 80%.
Teenage boy thinking There's controversy over how much rote learning teenagers
should have to do
Nick O'Connor, from Essex, is making good progress after 22 months of study. He
says: "It doesn't need a specific person or a specific brain. It's just about
being structured and having the motivation to get up every single day and go
out on the bike [to research the routes]. I'd say anyone could do it."
He typically spends two hours before work driving the prescribed routes, and
also pores over maps and past exam questions. Given that his day job is at a
London knowledge school, WizAnn, the city's streets are rarely out of his mind.
But dare one mention the word "sat-nav"? O'Connor is confident that man can
beat machine. "It's about speed of thought. Before you can even punch an
address into a sat-nav, the cab driver is often on his way because he knows
exactly where he needs to go."
A taxi driver may annoy a customer when the memory fails, but for performers it
is much worse.
Actor and writer Michael Simkins calls it the "ultimate nightmare". He recalls
the one occasion when it happened on stage. Tired, through working on other
projects, he forgot his lines in a big speech.
"It really shook me. It must have taken me 10 or 12 weeks to fully recover.
After that I was going through my lines in the wings every night, which can be
a fatal thing because it can breed further terror. I can still sense the scar
tissue 25 years later."
Method of loci
that need to be remembered
associations
Simkins, who has appeared in a large number of stage and TV roles, says actors
learn lines in very different ways. Some, like him, learn "by Victorian rote"
in advance, while others pick them up later, at the rehearsal stage. And the
demands of recurring dramas and soaps have produced a skill all of their own.
"When you work in soap operas, you find the regulars turn up barely knowing
their lines. They have an ability to learn lines at colossal speed, and then if
you ask them the next day what their lines were, they're not able to tell you.
It's a remarkable thing."
He says actors are good at covering mistakes, and audience members are unlikely
to know the exact script, so most go unnoticed. When they are spotted, context
is everything. A mistake followed by a swift, witty recovery in a comedy can
"really get the audience on your side". In a tragedy, less so.
Graver than tragedy, and indeed life itself, was the situation in which
Christina Aguilera found herself earlier this year when she mangled part of The
Star-Spangled Banner at the US Super Bowl. Televised cock-ups get flagged up so
quickly and passionately on Twitter and YouTube that performers can sometimes
earn notoriety for a single error.
Battle of Bannockburn engraving and the Battle of Hastings on the Bayeux
Tapestry Scottish and English pupils can usually remember the dates for
Bannockburn/Hastings
For the rest of us, learning precise chunks of information may not be necessary
for our financial survival, but it can bring an unaccountable pleasure.
Some, mainly older, readers could launch effortlessly into several verses of
Tennyson or Kipling they learned at school. Remembered poems are often
described as a "consolation", be that on a dull bus journey or during times of
adversity.
Today's primary school children tend to learn songs and lines for a play, as
well as useful tools like times tables, says Mark Brown, head teacher of St
Mary's Catholic Primary School in Axminster, Devon, but rarely whole poems, as
their grandparents would have done.
The ability of children to soak up and precisely recall information is often
underrated. Brown recalls a nativity play in which the boy playing Herod was
off sick. "One of the children came in and said 'I'll play him. I know all the
words.' In fact most of the children in the play knew all the words. To know
one part, you need to know everyone else's part."
Poetry recital was highlighted in the BBC's Off by Heart competition, where in
2009, thousands of primary school children learned and performed poems and,
this year, secondary school pupils will begin tackling passages from
Shakespeare.
The first 12 Off by Heart finalists had neither the unsettling precociousness
of spelling bee champions, nor much whiff of an elocution lesson. The winner,
10-year-old Yazdan Qafouri, was from an Iranian family granted asylum in the
UK, and had once lived in a tent. He seemed to exorcise the ghost of Miss Jean
Brodie from recitals.
But there is an undoubted element of power and status in knowing not just
information, but a distinct quotation or verse. In Yes Minister, Sir Humphrey
and his civil service colleague Bernard Woolley regularly flaunt their
classical education with word-perfect Latin and Greek quotations they know
their boss will not understand.
And could you imagine Gandalf plodding his way through a spell book instead of
issuing a majestic incantation? Or the late Keith Floyd using a recipe book?
Or not being moved by a five-year-old, his face wrinkled with effort as he
recites how full they are at the inn? It's not called "off by heart" for
nothing. Magic doesn't come off a cue card.