1885: Learning to Learn: A Modest Reappraisal of Rote
By Dr Clara Birdgun, M.A. (Somerville) Fellow of the National Society for Rational Instruction, Published in “Ladies of Light”
One must admire the splendid certainty with which my learned male colleagues continue to defend the ancient practice of rote instruction, as though the repetition of somebody else’s memory were a sacrament. They call it “aids to recollection.” I call it “educational taxidermy.” We preserve knowledge, certainly—but only by removing the vital parts.
The argument, repeated whenever Parliament remembers it has children, runs thus: Rote learning has worked for centuries; therefore it cannot be wrong. By that reasoning, we might retain the plague or the Corn Laws for their venerable record. Longevity is a poor reason for survival—dinosaurs lasted millions of years, and look where they are now.
When I corrected papers last week at the Women’s College, I asked my students—bright girls all, thoroughly saturated with the approved “aide‑mémoire” methods—if they could explain what distinguishes learning from recall. Most looked as one does when asked to describe air: they knew it was necessary, but invisible. Education, alas, has become a church where no one questions the litany.
Mr Ruskin, whom it is safe, if occasionally tedious, to quote, declared that “education is not teaching people to know what they do not know; it is teaching them to behave as they do not behave.” One might extend that charity to say we now teach people to remember what they have not understood. A student’s mind, under our present system, resembles a well-swept room filled with someone else’s furniture. There is polish—no comfort.
The defenders of memorisation will point triumphantly to results: rhyme, regularity, examinations passed, university gates admitted. But universities, in their current condition, do not measure intellect—they weigh it. The candidate who most obediently repeats is deemed the heaviest, not the highest. The result, visible to anybody who has survived a dinner in academic company, is a population of accomplished parrots dining out on borrowed metaphysics.
For centuries, the object of schooling has been to fit pupils for society—as though “society,” that notoriously unstable institution, were the aim rather than the audience. We have taught boys, and occasionally girls when the clerk miscounted, to recite the values of their elders, not to recognise their inheritance as negotiable. This may indeed preserve the social order, but only by guaranteeing its intellectual bankruptcy.
Our malaise is evident already. Ask any respectable gathering what knowledge is, and within five minutes someone will quote Macaulay, someone else will cite Scripture, and a third will whisper Darwin with the nervous reverence once reserved for the devil. No one, however, will admit that knowledge and certainty have parted company. We have filled the national mind with facts until it can think of nothing else. It is surprising how many people can declaim the dates of Plato without understanding a single thought of his.
The peril, which grows daily, is not ignorance but counterfeit understanding. The child trained to memorise without analysis grows into an adult who believes without evidence—a perfect citizen, perhaps, but a disastrous thinker. We have lately seen the consequences in certain spurious “scientific” movements claiming to reconstruct the world from its fossils upwards. No system of education that cannot distinguish critical reason from convenient conspiracy deserves the name.
Lord Bacon wrote centuries ago that “reading maketh a full man, conference a ready man, and writing an exact man.” Today we seem content with fullness alone, like overfed minds unable to move. If education is to remain useful—to serve more than the vanity of examinations—it must teach, alongside reading, writing, and arithmetic, the one art that binds all three: the art of learning itself.
By this, I mean not the mastery of facts, but the method of selection and scrutiny. We must show pupils how to separate prejudice from inference, assumption from evidence, eloquence from truth. Teach a child to question one thing properly, and you have prepared that child for a lifetime of useful discontent. Teach only repetition, and you have produced a voting majority.
I recall, as a young woman of impetuous sympathies, being rebuked for suggesting that curiosity might be a virtue. “Curiosity,” my tutor told me, “must be governed by discipline.” That was his word for dread. I countered—privately, of course—that discipline without curiosity was not education but quarantine. The exchange summarises the entire nineteenth century.
There is, of course, a certain charm in regularity. Teachers, like generals, love order even when it kills them. But once students have learned nothing but how to repeat correctness, they can no longer distinguish the elegant lie from the elegant truth. A civilisation raised upon recitation soon believes its own headlines. Thus we arrive where we now stand: in an England so proud of its schooling that it cannot bear to learn.
The progressive educators whom I am certain to offend are not my heroes either; they hope to replace rote with enthusiasm, a programme as exhausting as it is impractical. The ideal lies in neither spontaneity nor servility. What we need is apprenticeship to judgment itself—to the unshowy skill of thinking about thinking. The mind must learn to polish its lenses before it imagines output.
Huxley wrote in one of his pleasanter moods that “science is organised common sense.” I should like to extend his formula to education: Learning is organised doubt. We must not rid children of uncertainty; we must train them to bear it gracefully. The moment a mind knows how to ask why, the catechism loses its tyranny.
I have no wish to unmake tradition. I would merely like to observe it evolve, which is the fate of every living thing. Rote, I grant you, has resisted extinction for centuries, but so did the dodo until someone invented ships. Proper education must travel. Those who insist on the same curriculum for eternity will find, one day, that eternity is simply the past mislabelled.
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