Posted on 05/06/2023 10:48:41 AM PDT by CFW
n his rousing keynote address at The Heritage Foundation’s 50th anniversary gala last month, then-Fox News host Tucker Carlson offered an unexpected piece of advice: “Don’t throw away your hard-copy books.”
Unlike digitized books, films, and albums that can be canceled, rewritten, or vanished altogether, physical copies are “the enduring repository that cannot be disappeared.”
With their resurrection of poetry recitation requirements, educators in Georgia and Arkansas are protecting that repository in more ways than one, steeping students in a reality they can affirm, trust, and love.
Both states’ departments of education recently proposed revised K-12 English language arts standards that would require that students recite “all or part of significant poems and speeches as appropriate by grade level,” as the Georgia standards put it.
(Excerpt) Read more at dailysignal.com ...
We had to memorize the tell tale heart
That was a long time ago before students became stupid
‘Twas brillig and the slithy toves, did gyre and gimble in the wabe. All mimsy were to borogoves, and the mome raths ourgabe.
It’s hell on autocorrect, but you get the idea. I learned that maybe 45 years ago, and still remember the entire poem. It’s the rhythm that makes it stick, certainly not the content which is gibberish. I suppose it’s also good elocution practice too. There’s other poetry that actually contains wisdom or facts. Speaking of wisdom, memorizing by recitation of Bible verses is tremendously beneficial. The Bible contains immutable wisdom, lots of it. It can be abstracted from the Bible and most secularists would never know its origin.
Used bookstores should still have old copies of history books... I've got some going back decades. Totalitarian thugs on the left want to rewrite our history... fight them with hard copy old book. Tucker is so right on this...
Poetry helps in so many ways. Even nursery rhymes help children gain phonemic awareness—the sense of individual sounds, and people helps with pronunciation since a major problem with English is that there are no rules for which syllable to stress!
I do hope they teach *how* to memorize. On the few occasions they told us to memorize a poem, I just struggled along by reading it over and over, and there are much better ways to do it. It also helps to have a partner in the endeavor, a parent or friend or someone.
Beyond that, modern "education" has completely and totally eliminated the teaching of Rhetoric and Logic. This was part of western civilization education since the time of the Greeks - and the 20th century killed it.
And I say this as someone who is not an expert. Rather, I am someone who had a standard, progressive public school education, who only discovered later in life how flawed it was.
We had to memorize, in Latin, one page of a speech by Cicero, one page of a speech by St. Paul, and one page of a work, in Greek, by Aristophanes. and and their Englsh translations.
I never forgot them. I discovered that I had a photographic memory.
Hard copy books? What happens when global temperatures hit 451?
Thanks for posting. I just sent this to my two state reps and senator in Idaho asking them to take the lead on such an effort as done in Georgia and Arkansas.
This is GREAT!
Repetition is the mother of memory. Back in the grade school 1950s we had to repeat the times tables until we mastered them.
I’m not so dead set on ‘poetry’ requirements but I do think narratives that involve some sort of mellifluous vocalization could be beneficial.
IIRC, I once read that Carly Simon had a stuttering problem when she was young and what helped her most was actually ‘singing’ what she wanted to say. No stuttering.
Used bookstores should still have old copies of history books...
I can still recite Robert Frost’s “ Stopping by the Woods on a Snowy Evening.”
I can still recite most of the introduction to canterbury tales in middle english.
my college professor forced us to recite it.
The Beginnings ... by Kipling ...
I learned to love poetry at an early age, probably because my mom was a teacher-so we were learning to read at home before we went to kindergarten-she encouraged us to write some little poems, because kids naturally learn to make rhymes if they are encouraged-which teaches them to write and spell. I did the same for my cub. In English class we had to memorize, read and pick apart a chosen poem ever so often-I still have favorites-”Invictus”, for one. We also had older cousins and friends who taught us some R and X rated poems, too-”The Signifying Monkey” comes to mind...
I think it would be great to teach kids the power of the well-spoken/written word again-it would certainly improve the quality of conversation...
Oops. I hit “post” too soon!
thriftbooks.com is my go-to site for used books at great prices. Seems like they have every author & almost every title— history, politics, classical literature, philosophy, science, poetry, children’s, pop culture, etc.
Also, at https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/
you can download thousands of the foundational works of western civilization.
Same here-but it was fun trying to speak in middle English in normal conversation for awhile...
“Trees” by Kilmer.
Sadly, unless they are very specific that the poems should be from the classic western canon, I fear the teachers will be having the kids memorize some modernist tranny dreck to indoctrinate the kids.
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