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While a golden age of memorization is clearly going to be hard to find without going back to the pandits of the classical Sanskrit period (see Staal on Orality and Literacy, for a great study) the lack of such a time in recent memory seems a bit of a straw man. No, there was no such time, but there was a time when we were expected to learn more than we are today, and prior to that, a time when even more was required.
Is this a bad direction we're going in? The fact is that failure to memorize certain facts cripples the intellect and makes any real learning impossible, or at least highly unlikely. A music student who doesn't memorize his scales and chords will be severely hampered in their playing, no matter how clever their fingers. Someone who hasn't learned their arithmetical tables will be unable to understand the ways in which numbers relate to each other, shutting them out of most serious thought on public life. (although they will think they know something because they listen to public radio, they will only know what they are told, not what they think) Anyone who hasn't the ability or interest required to commit to memory the dates of historical events has not a hope of understanding the relations between those events, and thus will be entirely ignorant of history - and again, shut out of serious thought about current political events. And someone who doesn't memorize a poem will never hear the whole poem, which is only heard when you can hold the whole thing in your head at once, and their life will be much poorer for it.
The ability to track down trivia instantly is a pretty poor substitute for a curiousity about the world, if you ask me.

posted 5 years, 3 months ago
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