Thanks for the memory but I'd rather look it up

Aug 18 2008 By Sarah Evans

I was well into my 20s before it dawned on me that the ability to recite apt pieces of verse was not the most sensible criteria to use when choosing your partner through life.

Young men who could gaze into one’s eyes and quote Herrick or who had attitude and would spout Eliot or Auden seemed, in those innocent days, to offer the promise of a lifetime of happiness.

But life moves on and in the next phase the ability to put in a central heating system or replace a brake pad started to be qualities that more than held their own with a memory for lyrical poetry.

We rate verbal memory disproportionately as a society. The ability to quote, remember names, dates and facts is highly regarded and respected.

From those who can recall verbatim biblical passages or Latin aphorisms, to those who succeed in pub quizes and can remember the punch line of jokes, we admire them all.

I can do none of these things and indeed am the person least likely to be picked for any quiz team, so therefore regularly ask myself why a very precise recall is considered so important.

Our examination system, and all that goes with that in pigeonholing for a meritocracy, relies on memory.

To do very well, you need to be able to sort and use facts appropriately, but without being able to remember them, and remember them very quickly; you will never succeed at all. In phases of liberal education policy, there have been attempts to put less emphasis on recall, – literary texts could all be taken into examinations, formulae would be given, results would be awarded on extended essays and take-away papers – but there is always a suspicion this is sloppy and exam boards have swung back to insisting on quick recall and rote learning.

One of the reasons for the lack of popularity of languages is that it is impossible to get anywhere without either a very good natural memory or a willingness to spend a lot of time just learning vocabulary lists.

Of course life is not like examinations and – please note in this month of national examination results! – getting top grades is no guarantee of being interesting, creative, wise, kind, selfless or any of those other virtues that matter.

In life you can look things up, can take time to think in depth and the most interesting aspects of life can never be graded.

The first formal school memorizing a child does is usually spellings. I am bad at spelling so was pleased to find last week an article advocating a new approach.

An academic frustrated by the bad spelling of endless undergraduates, Dr Ken Smith, has suggested that instead of beating up the education system for its failure, we adopt a more relaxed attitude to those who can’t remember the exact order of letters.

We should, he wrote in an article in the Times Higher Education Supplement, widen our list of variant spellings.

We accept some words can be spelt different ways e.g. judgement and judgment.

We just need to include more.

Instead of dismissing bad spellers as either stupid or suffering from learning difficulties, we stop stressing about it and understand that just as Shakespeare could spell different words in different ways, so creativity, intellectual development and genius does not depend on spelling as defined by the Oxford English Dictionary.

I am surprisingly critical of other people’s spelling mistakes in formal prose e.g. letter applications, partly because I think if I can pick them out, they must be pretty dreadful errors and partly because I feel if I have had to check all my applications forms with a dictionary over the years, why can’t they be bothered?

But if you understand the meaning, does it matter, beyond being a social convention?

Losing your memory is a terrible thing and simpler forms of life don’t remember in the way humans do.

Certain sorts of memory are easily seen and easily tested but not all and the reliance on one sort of memory perhaps distorts perception and allows us to categorise and sort people in a way that is ultimately misleading and unhelpful.

In the Coronation Service, the monarch is handed the Bible with the words (I’ve had to look them up of course!) “We present you with this Book, the most valuable thing that this world affords”.

Very sensible. Just look up as necessary.