I stumbled across this book last week, and I can't put it down. It is the most hilarious "How To" guide and although it is mostly satire and sarcasm, the author makes many valid points about education (and parenting) methods that absolutely kill imagination.
My favorite chapter so far deals with dullness and memory. The author, Anthony Esolen, discusses how a school must be "the eater of time," filled with dull busywork. He says it's tricky, because a teacher has to walk a fine line between dull/pointless work and knowledge. Rote memorization seems like a good idea (dull, boring), but it opens a door to imagination. Whether or not the student crosses that threshold is irrelevant, because we have to close off all doors, crushing an potential. In order to prevent knowledge, he suggests we ban arithmetic and grammar from the curriculum as much as possible. Or, if we must, say, have grammar, we teach it in such a way that all students know about it is it's something they have to learn for no particular reason. That emphasizes the busywork and boring factors.
His explanation of memory was especially interesting, because it incorporates a lot of things I'm learning now, and things I've learned in the past. Memory is the key to the imagination. Without memory, we wouldn't have material for the imaginative mind to work with.
"That is because a developed memory is a wondrous and terrible storehouse of things seen and heard and done. It can do what no mere search engine on the internet can do. It can call up apparently unrelated things at once, molding them into a whole impression, or a new thought. The poet T.S. Eliot understood this creative, associative, dynamic function of a strong memory.
In class, we've talked a lot about the Muses, and I'm sure we talked about their origin, but it didn't hit me until I read this book that the Muses are the daughters of Memory. This ties in beautifully with Nabokov's synaesthesia and eideticism-- how memory is aided by those things, but it will be a harder sell with dyslexia. Most of the articles I have seen claim that dyslexics have atrocious memory etc etc. And I'm not sure that it altogether true. On one level, yes- I can see how visual memory cues involving writing and reading can be not so developed, but what about auditory and kinesthetic memories. My brother is dyslexic, and he remembers everything spoken to him (when he wants to), and once he's taught to do something with his hands, he always remembers. I'm going to look deeper into this.
