by Joshua Foer
I listened to one student recite verbatim an entire paragraph from Heart of Darkness to answer a question about nineteenth-century global commerce. “When it comes time to do the AP test, he’ll pull out a quote like that,” said Matthews, a dapper dresser with a goatee, closely cropped hair, and a thick Bronx accent. Every in-class essay his students write must contain at least two memorized quotations, just one of many small feats of memory that he demands from them. After school, his students come back for an extracurricular class in memorization techniques.
“It’s the difference between only teaching a kid multiplication and giving him a calculator,” Matthews says of the memory skills he imparts to them. Not surprisingly, every single member of the Talented Tenth has passed the Regents exam each of the last four years, and 85 percent of them have scored a 90 or better. Matthews has won two citywide Teacher of the Year awards.
Students in the Talented Tenth must wear shirts and ties, and occasionally, at school assemblies, white gloves. Their classroom is plastered with posters of Marcus Garvey and Malcolm X. When they graduate, they receive a kente cloth with the words “Talented Tenth” embossed in gold. At the beginning of each class, the Talented Tenth stand behind their desks, arranged in a pair of facing aisles, and recite in unison a three-minute manifesto from memory that begins: “We are the very best our community has to offer. We will not get lower than 95 percent on any history exam. We are the vanguard of our people. Either walk with our glory and rise to the top with us, or step aside. For when we get to the top, we will reach back and raise you up with us.”
The forty-three kids in Matthews’s class are all honors students who had to pass a high bar just to get selected for the Talented Tenth. And Matthews works his students hard. “We don’t get no vacations,” one of them complained to me, while Matthews was standing close enough to overhear. “You work now so you can rest later,” he told the student. “You carry your books now so someone else can carry your books later.”
The success of Matthews’s students raises questions about the purposes of education that are as old as schooling itself, and never seem to go away. What does it mean to be intelligent, and what exactly is it that schools are supposed to be teaching? As the role of memory in the conventional sense has diminished, what should its place be in contemporary pedagogy? Why bother loading up kids’ memories with facts if you’re ultimately preparing them for a world of externalized memories?
In my own elementary and secondary education, at both public and private schools, I can recall being made to memorize exactly three texts: the Gettysburg Address in third grade, Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech in fourth grade, and Macbeth’s “Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow” soliloquy in tenth. That’s it. The only activity more antithetical than memorization to the ideals of modern education is corporal punishment.
The slow disappearance of classroom memorization had its philosophical roots in Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s polemical 1762 novel, Émile: Or, On Education, in which the Swiss philosopher imagined a fictional child raised by means of a “natural education,” learning only through self-experience. Rousseau abhorred memorization, as well as just about every other stricture of institutional education. “Reading is the great plague of childhood,” he wrote. The traditional curriculum, he believed, was little more than fatuous “heraldry, geography, chronology and language.”
The educational ideology that Rousseau rebelled against truly was mind-numbing, and much in need of correction. More than a hundred years after Émile’s publication, when the muckraker Dr. Joseph Mayer Rice toured public schools in thirty-six cities, he came away appalled at what he saw, calling one New York City school “the most dehumanizing institution that I have ever laid eyes upon, each child being treated as if he possessed a memory and the faculty of speech, but no individuality, no sensibilities, no soul.” At the turn of the twentieth century, rote memorization was still the preferred way to put information, especially history and geography, into kids’ heads. Students could be expected to memorize poetry, great speeches, historical dates, times tables, Latin vocabulary, state capitals, the order of American presidents, and much else.
Memorization drills weren’t just about transferring information from teacher to student; they were actually thought to have a constructive effect on kids’ brains that would benefit them throughout their lives. Rote drills, it was thought, built up the faculty of memory. The what that was memorized mattered, but so too did the mere fact that the memory was being exercised. The same was thought to be true of Latin, which at the turn of the twentieth century was taught to nearly half of all American high school students. Educators were convinced that learning the extinct language, with its countless grammatical niceties and difficult conjugations, trained the brain in logical thinking and helped build “mental discipline.” Tedium was actually seen as a virtue. And the teachers were backed up by a popular scientific theory known as “faculty psychology,” which held that the mind consisted of a handful of specific mental “faculties” that could each individually be trained, like muscles, through rigorous exercise.
Toward the end of the nineteenth century, a group of leading psychologists began to question the empirical basis of “faculty psychology.” In his 1890 book Principles of Psychology, William James set out to see “whether a certain amount of daily training in learning poetry by heart will shorten the time it takes to learn an entirely different kind of poetry.” He spent more than two hours over eight successive days memorizing the first 158 lines of the Victor Hugo poem “Satyr,” averaging fifty seconds a line. With that baseline established, James set about memorizing the entire first book of Paradise Lost. When he returned to Hugo, he found that his memorization time had actually declined to fifty-seven seconds a line. Practicing memorization had made him worse at it, not better. It was just a single data point, but subsequent studies by the psychologist Edward Thorndike and his colleague Robert S. Woodworth also questioned whether “the general ability to memorize” was influenced by practice memorizing, and found only minor gains. They concluded that the ancillary benefits of “mental discipline” were “mythological” and that general skills, like memorization, were not nearly as transferable as had once been thought. “Pedagogues quickly realized that Thorndike’s experiments had undermined the rationale for the traditional curriculum,” writes the historian of education Diane Ravitch.
Into this void rushed a group of progressive educators led by the American philosopher John Dewey, who began making the case for a new kind of education that would radically break with the constricted curriculum and methods of the past. They echoed Rousseau’s romantic ideals of childhood, and put a new emphasis on “child centered” education. They did away with rote memorization and replaced it with a new kind of “experiential learning.” Students would study biology not by memorizing plant anatomy from a textbook but by planting seeds and tending gardens. They’d learn arithmetic not through times tables but through baking recipes. Dewey declared, “I would have a child say not, ‘I know,’ but ‘I have experienced.’ ”
The last century has been an especially bad one for memory. A hundred years of progressive education reform have discredited memorization as oppressive and stultifying—not only a waste of time, but positively harmful to the developing brain. Schools have deemphasized raw knowledge (most of which gets forgotten anyway), and instead stressed their role in fostering reasoning ability, creativity, and independent thinking.
But is it possible we’ve been making a huge mistake? The influential critic E. D. Hirsch Jr. complained in 1987: “We cannot assume that young people today know things that were known in the past by almost every literate person in the culture.” Hirsch has argued that students are being sent out into the world without the basic level of cultural literacy that is necessary to be a good citizen (what does it say that two thirds of American seventeen-year-olds can’t even tell you within fifty years when the Civil War occurred?), and what’s needed is a kind of
educational counterreformation that reemphasizes hard facts. Hirsch’s critics have pointed out that the curriculum he advocates is Dead White Males 101. But if anyone seems qualified to counter that argument it is Matthews, who maintains that for all the Eurocentrism of the curriculum, the fact is that facts still matter. If one of the goals of education is to create inquisitive, knowledgeable people, then you need to give students the most basic signposts that can guide them through a life of learning. And if, as the twelfth-century teacher Hugh of St. Victor put it, “the whole usefulness of education consists only in the memory of it,” then you might as well give them the best tools available to commit their education to memory.
“I don’t use the word ‘memory’ in my class because it’s a bad word in education,” says Matthews. “You make monkeys memorize, whereas education is the ability to retrieve information at will and analyze it. But you can’t have higher-level learning—you can’t analyze—without retrieving information.” And you can’t retrieve information without putting the information in there in the first place. The dichotomy between “learning” and “memorizing” is false, Matthews contends. You can’t learn without memorizing, and if done right, you can’t memorize without learning.
“Memory needs to be taught as a skill in exactly the same way that flexibility and strength and stamina are taught to build up a person’s physical health and well being,” argues Buzan, who often sounds like an advocate of the old faculty psychology. “Students need to learn how to learn. First you teach them how to learn, then you teach them what to learn.
“The formal education system came out of the military, where the least educated and most educationally deprived people were sent into the army,” he says. “In order for them not to think, which is what you wanted them to do, they had to obey orders. Military training was extremely regimented and linear. You pounded the information into their brains and made them respond in a Pavlovian manner without thinking. Did it work? Yes. Did they enjoy the experience? No, they didn’t. When the industrial revolution came, soldiers were needed on the machines, and so the military approach to education was transferred into school. It worked. But it doesn’t work over the long term.”
Like many of Buzan’s pontifications, this one conceals a kernel of truth beneath an overlay of propaganda. Rote learning—the old “drill and kill” method that education reformers have spent the last century rebelling against—is surely as old as learning itself, but Buzan is right that the art of memory, once at the center of a classical education, had all but disappeared by the nineteenth century.
Buzan’s argument that schools have been teaching memory in entirely the wrong way deeply challenges reigning ideas in education, and is often couched in the language of revolution. In fact, though Buzan doesn’t seem to see it this way, his ideas are not revolutionary so much as deeply conservative. His goal is to turn the clock back to a time when a good memory still counted for something.
Pinning down Tony Buzan for an interview is no easy task. He is on the road lecturing roughly nine months of the year, and boasts of having racked up enough frequent-flier miles to go to the moon and back eight times. What’s more, he seems to cultivate the sense of aloofness and inaccessibility that are a prerequisite for any self-respecting guru. When I finally corralled him behind a desk at the World Memory Championship to discuss the possibility of our sitting down for a couple hours, he opened a large three-ring binder and unfurled a colorful panoramic chart, perhaps three feet long. It was his calendar from the previous year, and it was filled with expansive, continuous blocks of travel—Spain, China, Mexico three times, Australia, America. There was one three-month period when he didn’t set foot in the United Kingdom. He told me that he absolutely didn’t have any time to speak with me for at least three or four weeks (by which time I would be back home in the United States), but he suggested I visit his estate halfway to Oxford on the river Thames and take some photographs while he was away.
I told him I didn’t see how I was likely to learn very much from an empty house.
“Oh, you’d learn quite a lot,” he said.
Eventually, through his assistant, I was able to fix an hour with Buzan in his limousine on his way home from the BBC studios in London, where he had just wrapped up a TV interview. I was told to go to a street corner in Whitehall and wait. “You won’t be able to miss Mr. Buzan’s car.”
There was, in fact, no missing it. The car, which pulled up about half an hour late, was a bright ivory 1930s taxicab that looked like it might have just been driven off a BBC set. The door flew open. “Step inside,” said Buzan, beckoning. “Welcome to my small, traveling, beautiful lounge.”
The first subject we spoke about, because I had to ask, was his unique wardrobe.
“I designed it myself,” he told me. He was wearing the same unusual dark navy suit with the large gold buttons that I’d seen him in at the U.S. championship months earlier. “I used to lecture in an offthe-peg suit, but I was tugging at it with my expansive gestures,” he told me. “So I studied fifteenth-, sixteenth-, seventeenth-, eighteenth-, and nineteenth-century swordfighters, and how their arms had not one iota of resistance from their wardrobes. Those ruffles and big sleeves weren’t just for show. They were for thrusting and parrying. I design my shirts so that I, too, am free to move.”
Everything about Buzan gives the strong impression of someone wanting to make a strong impression. He never swallows a syllable or slouches. His fingernails are as well cared for as the leather of his Italian shoes. There is always a pocket handkerchief tucked neatly in his breast pocket. He signs his letters “Floreant Dendritae!”—“May Your Brain Cells Flourish!”—and ends his phone messages “Tony Buzan, over and out!”
When I asked him about the source of his incredible self-confidence, he told me that he owes much of it to his extensive training in the martial arts. He has a black belt in aikido and is three quarters of his way to a black belt in karate. Sitting in the backseat of his limo, he demonstrated a series of jerky moves, a slice through the air, and a shadow punch. “The way I use these techniques is by not using them,” he said. “What’s the point of fighting if you know you can kill the other, i.e. human, or you can take out his eye, or rip out his tongue?”
Buzan is—he often found occasion to remind me—a modern Renaissance man: a student of dance (“ballroom, modern, jazz”), a composer (influences: “Philip Glass, Beethoven, Elgar”), an author of short stories about animals (under the nom de plume Mowgli, after the boy in The Jungle Book), a poet (his last collection, Concordea, consists entirely of poems written on and about his thirty-eight transatlantic flights aboard the supersonic Concorde), and a designer (not just of his wardrobe, but also of his home and much of the furniture in it).
About forty-five minutes outside of London, our ivory chariot pulled into Buzan’s estate on the river Thames. He asked that I not name its location in print. “Just call it Wind in the Willows territory.”
Inside his home, named the Gates of Dawn, we took off our shoes and tiptoed around a collection of drawings that had been laid out across the floor, part of an illustrated children’s book that he was working on “about a little boy who doesn’t do well in school, but does very well in his imagination.” There was a large television set with at least a hundred VHS tapes scattered about it, and a bookshelf in the foyer that held the complete Encyclopaedia Britannica Great Books of the Western World, several copies of the sci-fi thriller Dune, three copies of the Quran, a large quantity of books authored by Buzan, and not much else.
“Is this your library?” I asked.
“I’m only here three months of the year. I have libraries in several other places around the world,” he said.
Buzan revels in travel, and in being a man of the world. Once, when I asked him where he’s able to find the concentration to turn out two or three books a year, he told me that he has found serene spots to work on almost every continent. “In Australia at the Great Barrier Reef, I write. In Europe
, wherever there are oceans, I write. In Mexico, I write. At the Great West Lake in China, I write.” Buzan has been traveling since he was a young boy. He was born in London in 1942, but moved with his brother and parents—his mother was a legal stenographer, his father an electrical engineer—to Vancouver at age eleven. He was, he says, “basically a normal kid, in normal trouble, in normal schools.”
“My best friend growing up was a boy named Barry,” Buzan recalled, sitting outside on his patio with his pink shirt unbuttoned and a pair of large, wraparound geriatric sunglasses protecting his eyes. “He was always in the 1-D classes, while I was in 1-A. One-A was for the bright kids, D for the dunces. But when we went out into nature, Barry could identify things by the way they flew over the horizon. Just from their flight patterns, he could distinguish between a red admiral, a painted thrush, and a blackbird, which are all very similar. So I knew he was a genius. And I got a top mark in an exam on nature, a perfect mark, answering questions like ‘Name two fish you can find living in an English stream.’ There are a hundred and three. But when I got back my perfect mark on the test, I suddenly realized that the kid sitting down the hall in the dunces’ class, my best friend, Barry, knew more than I knew—much more than I knew—in the subject in which I was supposedly number one. And therefore, he was number one, and I was not number one.
“And suddenly, I realized the system that I was in did not know what intelligence was, didn’t know how to identify smart and not smart. They called me the best, when I knew I wasn’t, and they called him the worst, when he was the best. I mean, there could be no more antipodal environment. So I began to question: What is intelligence? Who says? Who says you’re smart? Who says you’re not smart? And what do they mean by that?” Those questions, at least according to Buzan’s tidy personal narrative, dogged him until he got to college.