Thanks for the Memories: Rote is right.(National Spelling Bee is won by a home-schooled student)

In what has now become a hardy perennial of U.S. minor-news reporting, the $10,000 grand prize at this year's National Spelling Bee was won yet again by a homeschooled competitor, 13-year-old Sean Conley from Shakopee, Minn. Young Sean tells us that in preparation for the contest he learned, presumably by memorizing them, 20,000 words-a return on investment of a very creditable 50 cents per word.

Why do homeschooled children do so well at this kind of competition? One factor is surely the willingness of parents to permit the use of rote memorization as a learning technique. In schools of education, where many professional teachers are trained, memorization is seriously frowned on. The dominant philosophy in these places is "constructivism"-the belief that, as propagandists of the movement say: "Children actively construct their own knowledge."

Constructivists believe that through guided experimentation and supervised play, children can discover for themselves true facts about the world, and that this "child-centered" approach is pedagogically (and, one cannot help deducing from their writings, also morally) superior to the more traditional "instructor-centered" methods. The slogan of the constructivists is: "I hear, I forget; I see, I remember; I do, I understand." These ideas are generally credited to the Swiss psychologist Jean Piaget, whose work in the second quarter of the 20th century established the basic principles. However, constructivism has obvious roots in the educational philosophy of Jean-Jacques Rousseau and his disciple Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi, and it was Rousseau who delivered the first blast against rote memorization 200 years ago in Book Two of Emile.

The constructivist approach is not without merit. Many skills, particularly those requiring mind-body coordination, can be acquired only by hands-on practice. One of the most compelling accounts of the learning process is the one given by Mark Twain in Life on the Mississippi, where he tells how he learned to navigate a river steamboat, mainly by just doing it-under expert guidance, of course. It is only that "I do, I understand" is not the whole story. Certainly it is true that you will not master a foreign language unless, at some point, you actually try to speak or write it. It is also true, however, that you will not master a language well unless you have committed to memory long lists of vocabulary and grammatical rules.

With more purely intellectual studies, rote memorization is, it seems to me, even more indispensable. It is difficult to see how history, for example, can be learned by "doing" it. To gain some understanding of any historical process, you need to know the order in which things happened. The simplest way to do this is to memorize key dates. Nor can much that is important about literature or mathematics be imparted by letting students doodle "creatively" with words and numbers.

I speak from prejudice here, as my own education at pre-constructivist English schools was premised on the idea that true understanding can be built only on a foundation of memorized material. At my elementary school we mustered in the playground in good weather, then were marched off to our classrooms chanting the multiplication tables. Poetry was taught almost entirely by memorization. (Is there any other way?) We had to commit great slabs of verse to memory, from T. S. Eliot's "Macavity," which my whole fourth-grade class recited at a school Christmas show, to Chaucer's "Prologue" in the actual Middle English (with much sniggering about "Zephirus-eek!-with his sweaty breath"). I remain convinced that you don't know much about a poem until you have memorized it. I admit that in the case of "Paradise Lost" or "The ...