Moonwalking With Einstein (21 page)

I explained my predicament to Ed. He knew it well. “I eventually had to excise my mother from my deck,” he said. “I recommend you do the same.”

Ed was a stern coach, who berated me for the “lackadaisical character” of my training. If I went more than a few days without sending him my latest times, or admitted that I was not, in fact, putting in a half an hour a day as he’d commanded, I would receive a caustic reprimand via e-mail.

“You’ve got to step up your training because it’s inevitably the case that your performance will drop in the tournament itself,” he warned. “You might have the perfect sporting mentality and actually raise your score, but you’ve got to work on the assumption that you’re going to do better in practice than you’ll do in the tournament.”

In my own defense, “lackadaisical” wasn’t quite the word I’d have chosen. Now that I had put the OK plateau behind me, my scores were improving on an almost daily basis. The sheets of random numbers that I’d memorized were piling up in the drawer of my desk. The dog-eared pages of verse I’d learned by heart were accumulating in my
Norton Anthology of Modern Poetry
. I was beginning to suspect that if I kept improving at the current pace, I might actually have a chance of doing well in the competition.

Ed sent me a quote from the venerable martial artist Bruce Lee, which he hoped would serve as inspiration: “There are no limits. There are plateaus, but you must not stay there, you must go beyond them. If it kills you, it kills you.” I copied that thought onto a Post-it note and stuck it on my wall. Then I tore it down and memorized it.

NINE

THE TALENTED TENTH

N
ot long after returning from England, I found myself sitting on a folding chair in the basement of my parents’ home at 6:45 a.m., wearing underpants, earmuffs, and memory goggles, with a printout of eight hundred random digits in my lap and an image in my mind’s eye of a lingerie-clad garden gnome (52632) suspended over my grandmother’s kitchen table. I suddenly looked up, wondering—remarkably, for the first time—what in the world I was doing with myself.

I realized I’d become fixated on the other competitors. With the help of detailed statistics kept on the memory circuit’s stats server, I had made myself familiar with each of their strengths and weaknesses, and I’d measured my own scores against theirs with compulsive regularity. The opponent whom I had become most preoccupied with was not the defending champ, Ram Kolli, a twenty-five-year-old business consultant from Richmond, Virginia, but rather Maurice Stoll, a thirty-year-old beauty-products importer and speed-numbers hotshot from outside Ft. Worth, Texas, who grew up in Germany. I had met him at the previous year’s competition. He had a shaved head and a goatee, spoke with an intimidating German accent (anything Germanic is intimidating at a memory contest), and was one of the only Americans to have ever crossed the Atlantic to compete in a European memory contest (he finished fifteenth at the World Memory Championship in 2004 and seventh at that year’s Memory World Cup). He held the U.S. records in both speed numbers (144 digits in five minutes) and speed cards (a single deck in a minute and fifty-six seconds). His only weaknesses were poetry (in which he was ranked ninety-ninth in the world) and insomnia. Everyone agreed he ought to have won the previous year’s contest but instead stalled out and finished fourth because he’d only gotten three hours of rest the night before. This year, if he could get to bed on time, I expected he was the favorite to win. And I was now putting in a solid half hour a day to ensure that he didn’t.

As I burrowed deeper into my mental training, I was starting to wonder if the sort of memorization practiced by mental athletes was not something like the peacock’s tail: impressive not for its utility, but for its profound lack of utility. Were these ancient techniques anything more than “intellectual fossils,” as the historian Paulo Rossi once put it, fascinating for what they tell us about the minds of a bygone era, but as out of place in our modern world as quill pens and papyrus scrolls?

That has always been the rap against memory techniques: They’re impressive but ultimately useless. The seventeenth-century philosopher Francis Bacon declared, “I make no more estimation of repeating a great number of names or words upon once hearing ... than I do of the tricks of tumblers,
funambuloes
,
baladines
: the one being the same in the mind that the other is in the body, matters of strangeness without worthiness.” He thought the art of memory was fundamentally “barren.”

When the sixteenth-century Jesuit missionary Matteo Ricci tried to introduce memory techniques to Chinese Mandarins studying for the imperial civil service exam, he was met with resistance. He planned to hook them first on European study skills before trying to hook them on the European god. The Chinese objected that the method of loci required so much more work than rote repetition, and claimed their way of memorizing was both simpler and faster. I could understand where they were coming from.

The demographics of your
average memory contest are pretty much indistinguishable from those of a “Weird Al” Yankovic (five of spades) concert. An overwhelming number of contestants are young, white, male juggling aficionados. Which is why it’s impossible to miss the dozen or so students who show up at the U.S. championship each year in proper church attire. They are from the Samuel Gompers Vocational High School in the South Bronx, and their American history teacher, Raemon Matthews, is a Tony Buzan disciple.

If I had thought that the art of memory was just a form of mental peacocking, Matthews aimed to prove otherwise. He has dubbed the group of students he trains for the U.S. Memory Championship the “Talented Tenth,” after W. E. B. Du Bois’s notion that an elite corps of African-Americans would lift the race out of poverty. When I first encountered Matthews at the 2005 U.S. Memory Championship, he was pacing anxiously at the back of the room, while he waited for his students’ scores in the random words event to come in. Several of his students were vying for a top-ten finish, but as far as he was concerned, the real test of their memories was still two and a half months away, when they would sit for the New York State Regents exam. By the end of the year, he expected his students to have memorized every important fact, date, and concept in their U.S. history textbook using the same techniques they employed in the U.S. Memory Championship. He invited me to come visit his classroom to witness memory techniques being used “in the real world.”

To take him up on his offer, I had to pass through a metal detector and have my bag searched by a police officer before entering the Gompers school building. Matthews believes that the art of memory will be his students’ ticket out of a neighborhood where nine out of ten students are below average in reading and math, four out of five are living in poverty, and nearly half don’t graduate from high school. “The memorization of quotes allows a person to seem more legitimate,” he told them, while I sat in the back of his classroom. “Who are you going to be more impressed by, the person who has a litany of his own opinions, or the historian who can draw on the great thinkers who came before him?”

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.