The Power of the Spoken Word

打開文本圖片集

“背誦全文”的魅力

New educational standards in Georgia and Arkansas, USA include modest-sounding requirements that are in fact revolutionary.

In Georgia students will be required to build “background knowledge” by reciting all or part of significant poems and speeches. The Arkansas plan calls for students to recite a passage from a well-known poem, play or speech. That’s it: an old-fashioned demand that students memorize the Gettysburg Address or Hamlet’s “To be or not to be” or Gwendolyn Brooks’s We Real Cool and recite it to an audience.

Most parents would probably call this a worthy exercise, encouraging their kids to speak in public and firing the adolescent imagination. While English teachers could object to lodging memorable words in teenage heads. Modern educators view memorization as empty repetition, mechanical and prescriptive rather than creative or thoughtful. Reciting texts from memory, they say, merely drops information into students’ minds. It’s rote learning instead of critical analysis.

That’s wrong. Recitation allows students to experience a text as a living thing, ready to be taken up by a new generation. Committing a poem or speech to memory means stepping into the author’s shoes and considering what he meant. Deciding which words to stress when reciting means thinking about what those words mean. This is why public speaking was once a requirement at many colleges and universities.

In our age of social media and artificial intelligence, the practice of recitation has never been more needed. Memorizing classic words reminds us that they are alive.

When young reciters return to their seats, they know they have made ageless words their own. What parents and students feel at that moment transcends a good grade. For a few minutes, striving teens become King, Frost or Shakespeare.

“Every man is an orator,” Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote. “The eloquence of one stimulates all the rest... to a degree that makes them good receivers and conductors.” Reciting classic lines brings past eloquence into the present, turning us into receivers and conductors. When we weigh the words of influential men and women and realize they are still useful, we all benefit. Georgia and Arkansas understand this. Let’s hope many more states follow their lead.

美國的佐治亞州和阿肯色州推出了新教育標(biāo)準(zhǔn)，標(biāo)準(zhǔn)中包含了一些看起來不起眼，但實(shí)際上具有改革性的要求。（剩余903字）