Ep 02 | Remember, Remember, Remember
Young children like things repeated and unchanged. They also love to know things, memorizing what they’ve heard in an almost effortless way. These are the trademark characteristics of the grammar stage in a classical education. As a child memorizes, they form natural relationships with the world around them and learn to love what they know. It’ll happen whether or not you offer them noble ideas, meaning their memories can be full of beauty or full of junk. It can be Bach or Cardi B, but something will fill and form your child’s memory, and that will shape their heart’s affections.
Let’s talk about it.
Episode Notes
Continuing Education Picks
The Lifegiving Home: Creating a Place of Belonging and Becoming, Sally and Sarah Clarkson
Know and Tell, Karen Glass
Scholé Sisters, Ep 90| Background Knowledge (The Door to Reading)
Classical Heavyweights
On Christian Teaching, St. Augustine
Beauty in the Word: Rethinking the Foundations of Education, Stratford Caldecott
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READ THE TRANSCRIPT
[Child’s voice]
Gentlemen may cry, Peace, Peace — but there is no peace. The war is actually begun! The next gale that sweeps from the north will bring to our ears the clash of resounding arms! Our brethren are already in the field! Why stand we here idle? What is it that gentlemen wish? What would they have? Is life so dear, or peace so sweet, as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery? Forbid it, Almighty God! I know not what course others may take; but as for me, give me liberty or give me death!
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Well, that was my oldest at the start of the show. She’s four, and she’s been working on that Patrick Henry speech for a while now along with her little brother. Little kids shouting, “Give me liberty or give me death” while playing outside is as hilarious as you might think.
No surprise here: We’re going to talk about memory today—both what it is and how to cultivate it. But first, we need to understand why we should think about it and why focus on it in these early years.
You see, I know your kids are very special and unique and wonderful, but they’re also probably common children. Just like mine. And what I mean by common is that they, like children throughout the history of the world, share common characteristics.
If you have a bunch of youngsters under the age of 11 or 12, you probably have curious, active, memorizers who love things to be repeated and unchanged. If you have kiddos in that 11 to 15 range, they’re eager to debate, always wanting to understand the why behind something, and delighted to point out the flaws in your logic or actions. And if you have some in the 15 to 19 range, well, they’re a little poetic: eager to discuss the things that really matter to them and make a difference in the world. And if they’re not given the right tools for expression, they’ll try to express themselves through things like weird hairdos and music.
While kids move through these stages at different speeds, they all do it. So, in a way, this is how a soul grows up.
And that little intro is a very high overview of the three stages of a classical education, which are known as the grammar, logic, and rhetoric stages. For our purposes, we’re talking about the earliest part of the grammar stage, and who better to kick us off than Charlotte Mason?
Miss Mason said that children come into the world with an appetite for all knowledge; for the heroic past and the age of myths, for the desire to know about all that moves and lives, for strange places and strange people, and to do whatever the law of gravitation permits.
Ah, whatever the law of gravitation permits. It’s like she’s watched my children throw themselves off furniture lately.
But she’s totally right. This is what little kids are like. It’s the little boy who is bursting to tell you every fact about dinosaurs. Or the toddler who stops to look at every rock on the sidewalk or watch a single ant walk around for as long as he’s allowed. Or have you ever noticed how quickly and quietly children memorize their favorite books? Songs?
This type of learning and growing in memory and repetition is God-designed. It’s not that kids can just do this; it’s that they’re exceptionally good at this.
You know who remembers my grocery list? My four-year-old. She never forgets a thing.
So while kids love to know things, they also love to repeat things. Think about when you finish reading a book with a child and they ask to read it again immediately. They want to know: will things happen the same way? Is the ending the same? Can I be sure? Will the characters be the same and do the same things? And when they find out that the book is the same, they’re delighted. Just knowing is a gift in and of itself.
But, you know, this gift can be something that frustrates parents. I’m going to take a chance and speak for you too, but usually we adults don’t love repetition, do we? When my kids cry out, ‘Again! Again!’ and I think surely we cannot read Frog and Toad’s gluttonous experience with cookies one. more. time, I take a second and remember some thoughts from G.K. Chesterton.
He says, “Children have abounding vitality because they want things repeated and unchanged. They’re always saying do it again and the grown up does it until he’s nearly dead. Grown up people are not strong enough to exult in monotony but perhaps God is strong enough. Maybe every morning God tells the sun do it again and maybe every evening he tells the moon do it again. Maybe it’s not that daisies are made alike but maybe it’s that he makes every one separately because he’s never tired of making them.”
Chesteron says that God has the eternal appetite of infancy for we have sinned and grown old, but our Father is younger than we.
That’ll change your perspective, right?
Now, do you remember last episode when we talked about honoring the image bearer? This is where that starts to get practical.
In part, this means understanding the stage of learning your child is in and offering them the good, the true, and the beautiful in a way that works with this God-ordained design. It requires honoring their love of knowing things by heart and repetition. And, yes, it requires singing that song, reading that book, playing that game again.
You’re cultivating something; you’re actually building a storehouse of goodness in your child’s memory.
Memory is an interesting thing. Generally, to memorize means to commit something to memory or to learn something by heart. It comes from the Latin memoria, and that means mindful or remembering.
I really like the use of remembering because it describes something more than just a simple fact memorized, like if you might be cramming for a test but quickly forget the answers as you walk out of the room or if, like my oldest, you remember the grocery list for as long as you’re shopping.
Memory is about knowing, contemplating, and acting.
Which is why remembering is one of the great imperatives in scripture. God’s people are told to remember his words and works, repeating it all to themselves and their children regularly. They’re also told to remember their own histories and to tell them to one another in order to form a collective memory of God’s goodness and faithfulness in the big picture and the commonplace moments of life.
But we, as moderns, live in a world of forgetfulness. For centuries people have argued that memory work is unpleasant and unprofitable. Unsurprisingly, people stopped honoring memory. And now, we Google everything. We find our answer and immediately forget that little piece of knowledge. We live in a way that allows and encourages us to forget.
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Let’s pause here for a brief moment for me to say: I’m not trying to include The Chronicles of Narnia into every episode, but here I am: three for three. Maybe, in the future, Cair Paravel will sponsor The Commonplace. Until then, further up and further in.
Okay, back to the show.
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When prepping for this episode, I couldn’t help but think of Aslan talking to Jill Pole in The Silver Chair. He gives her a trinitarian call saying, Remember remember remember. Echoing Deuteronomy 6, Aslan tells her to repeat the given signs to herself when she wakes, when she lays down for the night, and when she wakes in the middle of the night. He knows Jill will be prone to forget them, that the truths won’t seem so clear when she reaches Narnia, so he instructs her on how to form a pattern of memory in a way that will serve her and others through her. She needs to know them by heart, remembering them in a way that offers wisdom and relationship.
That’s what happens to us too: we’re apt to forget. But, as born persons, we’re also made to remember.
How do I know such things? Well, the memory is given by God, which means it’s good and it needs to be cultivated. We also, in the simplest of ways, can’t learn anything without committing some things to memory.
But here’s when we start getting classical with it:
St. Augustine made the observation that to really understand what you read, to really learn and connect and find relationships, you need to have concrete knowledge of natural things in your mind. You need an active memory of your contact with a great many things...which is exactly what Charlotte Mason said in her principle about the science of relations.
The science of relations is a strange phrase to us, but during Miss Mason’s work, everything was a science. Homemaking was a science. Cooking was a science. Science was a science. She was pulling on a knowable buzzword. But what she was saying is a child needs a lot of natural introductions to a lot of things. They’re forming relationships with the world around them from the time they are born and as they grow in the grammar stage, so does their ability to learn, commit to memory, and establish relationships. And relationships with natural things form a child’s affections, and, looping back to Augustine, we’re educating to form a rightly ordered heart.
What’s interesting is your child is going to form a memory whether or not your offer them lovely things. It’s what they’re made to do: to take in the things around them and form relationships and loves with these things. A memory can be full of beautiful, noble living ideas or it can be full of junk. It can be Bach or Cardi B. But something will fill and form your child’s memory.
And while your children are delighted by learning things by heart, by the natural world around them, by histories and stories and faraway people—why not fill them up with the very best? Why not lay a foundation for winsome and long-lasting relationships with the many good gifts in God’s world?
Let’s help them Remember, remember, remember.
We’re going to wrap up this episode with three practical tips for memory work at home with little ones:
First, Consider your atmosphere.
Children delight in learning things, but they’re attracted to anything truly beautiful. First, make your attitude beautiful: be enjoyable, interested, and gentle. Then, make the offering beautiful: set tables with candles, walk on nature trails, dress up for tea time, flip through art books, twirl around to Swan Lake, go on a tree hunt until you find the perfect one for your afternoon read aloud.
This is not the time for set schedules of table worksheets or insisting you finish the flashcard deck while your child cries. We’re not bludgeoning children with information; we’re inviting them to a feast.
Last year I read 1984 and one thing that struck me was the intentional removal of words from society in order to prohibit people from thinking certain ideas. Basically, if you don’t have the words to talk or think about ideas, the ideas, in a sense, die.
We want to give children the words and pictures they need in order to dwell on noble and beautiful ideas and realities.
Now, of course, the things we’re sharing with our children are themselves beautiful. They don’t need to be dressed up or program-planned or perfectly executed to delight and form a memory. Truly beauty attracts us to truth and goodness all on its own. So remember this is a gift to get to share with your children and not a burden or curated one-time experience. This is setting a pattern of your home’s atmosphere towards humanizing and harmonizing rhythms.
It can be as simple as singing “This is My Father’s World” every time you walk through the woods. We did this for a while, and now, my two-year-old belts out the words as he looks at rocks and trees and skies and, well, not seas because we’re in central PA, but you get the idea. The living idea is all around him; what he’s committed to memory is now in relationship to the world he lives in. He understands eternal truths as they’re communicated in word and in nature. It’s beautiful. And all I do is make nature and hymn singing a regular part of our lives.
See? Which leads to my next tip.
Remember this is about building a child’s memory, not a report card.
This isn’t formal school, this is a whole life. And it’s okay if your kids learn at different speeds. This isn’t a standardized test or a ‘must do before this age or on this week of the year’ sort of thing. It’s far more important for a child to truly understand something than for you to check off a new memory work box every week.
Lastly, stay focused. I know from experience that jumping around from this psalm to this poem to this hymn can actually frustrate and anger a child. Keep a post-it, a notebook, or a Google doc running of things you’d like to learn together, but don’t waterboard them with goodness. I keep a binder for what we call The Benediction Table. The kids and I formed a proper Society, we call ourselves The Society of Kernels Who Drink Tea, and we gather at our table to be equipped in order to go out and bless. Each month, I fill out my sheet with a family rule, catechisms, scripture reading, habits, a hymn, and pull from our learned memory work for review. I don’t hit all of those sections when we’re at the table, but it gives me a focus for each month so that when we hit those moments during the day like—sitting in traffic, walking through the store, waiting for something, sharing a picnic—I have a plethora of excellent things to start talking about with them right on my mind. We fill our days with beautiful things just by filling these extra spaces of time. And I love that because these living ideas are introduced within normal life; they’re not to puff up but to equip us to serve.
And don’t forget, because memory work is for souls, if it’s good for them to learn, it’s good for you to learn. Memorize with them.
When we think about a virtuous person, it’s not so much that he or she is faced with a situation and they properly consider their options and choose the most virtuous one. Of course, there’s some of that thought involved, but it’s more that this person has an almost knee-jerk reaction towards righteousness; it’s a habit that’s been formed through repetition and repeated interactions with what is good. Which is, of course, what we all want for our children.
And one part of that is the cultivation of a memory by regular, natural introductions to all that is good, true, and beautiful.
I’ll see you guys in two weeks.
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