Should You Teach Your Children That "He" Is a Politically-Incorrect Pronoun?→

No, because it is potentially dangerous not to teach the grammatically correct usage of “he.”

In Defense of Language

Defenders of language are opposed to the idea of gender-neutralizing language, as are many, many others.

So I was not a little taken aback when a friend told me that I should replace the pronoun "he" with "they" in my writing.

Her concern was that people would think I was literally writing about boys rather than understanding "he" is a centuries-old pronoun that stands in place of an antecedent noun that could be of either sex.

Dumb-founded by my friend’s reasoning, I asked a couple of my grammarian friends if they had encountered this same concern. Maybe their being British had some bearing on my findings, but each emphatically said, "No!"

If you read Mr. Gwynne's Grammar, a best seller in England, you will find a section on the use of the pronoun "he." Mr. Gwynne makes a point of differentiating between “sex” and “gender.”

“The word to indicate whether someone is male or female is ‘sex,’ not ‘gender,’ which is purely a grammatical term.”

— Mr. Gwynne

Basic Grammar

Assigning gender to a noun is woven into the structure of many languages, including the Romance languages. The gender of a noun will determine which form of an adjective or pronoun should accompany it.

For example, in Latin, “mensa” is a feminine noun that means "table.” To say " the beautiful table," we use the adjective’s feminine form of “beautiful” to agree with the feminine gender of “table,” hence, “mensa pulchra.”

French, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese and Romanian follow a similar structure.

As you can see, gender in language has nothing to do with an individual's biological sex regardless of claims to the contrary, although there is of course some overlap when human beings and animals of the female sex are being referred to.

As reason would have it, therefore, the correct use of the pronoun "he," to stand in place of a noun that could be of either sex, is not sexist but grammatically correct.

For example, let’s take this sentence as an example: “If we teach a child to read too early, he may struggle to read well later.”

“He” stands in the place of “child,” who could be either a boy or a girl.

“I’ve studied authoritarianism for a very long time - for 40 years - and they’re started by people’s attempts to control the ideological and linguistic territory”

— Jordan Peterson

Language Does Matter

Using language correctly does matter. If you’re unsure of how much our freedom of speech depends upon the correct use of language, read George Orwell’s book, 1984.

Our language is the means through which we understand ourselves and the world in which we live. When we start meddling with one of its basic units, we do so with potentially disastrous results, such as being confused about the biological difference between a man or a woman.

There's a sort of madness at play here.

My point is that if you are a homeschooling parent teaching your child English grammar, please teach him that "he" is a centuries-old pronoun and cannot be replaced with “they".

Instead, teach your child that “he” replaces the antecedent noun when the noun could be of either sex, and we cannot afford to lose him!

Don’t miss our free download, Ten Books Every Well-Educated Child Should Read.

Teach your child to read before sending him to school! Learn more about Elizabeth's unique course, How to Teach Your Child to Read and Raise a Child Who Loves to Read.

For parents of children under age seven who would like to prepare their child for social and academic success, please begin with Elizabeth’s singular online course, Raise Your Child to Thrive in Life and Excel in Learning.

When you join the Smart Homeschooler Academy online course for parents, Elizabeth will make homeschooling manageable for you. She’ll guide you in helping your kids reach their intellectual potential and developing good character.

As a homeschooler, you will feel confident, calm, and motivated knowing you have the tools and support you need to homeschool successfully.

Elizabeth Y. Hanson is a homeschooling thought-leader and the founder of Smart Homeschooler.

As an Educator, Homeschool Emerita, Writer, and Love and Leadership Certified Parenting Coach, Elizabeth has 21+ years of experience working in education.

Developing a comprehensive understanding of how to raise and educate a child, she devotes her time to helping parents get it right.

Elizabeth is available for one-on-one consultations as needed.

"I know Elizabeth Y. Hanson as a remarkably intelligent, highly sensitive woman with a moral nature and deep insight into differences between schooling and education. Elizabeth's mastery of current educational difficulties is a testimony to her comprehensive understanding of the competing worlds of schooling and education. She has a good heart and a good head. What more can I say?”

—John Taylor Gatto Distinguished educator, public speaker, and best-selling author of Dumbing Us Down: The Hidden Curriculum of Compulsory Schooling

Should “He” Still Be Taught in Grammar?→

In Defense of Language

Defenders of language are opposed to the idea of gender-neutralizing language, as are those of us working in the field of traditional education.

And many, many others.

So I was not a little taken aback the other day when a friend told me that I should replace the pronoun "he" with "they" in my writing.

His concern was that people would think I was literally writing about boys rather than understanding "he" is a centuries-old pronoun that stands in place of an antecedent noun that could be of either sex.

Let’s take this sentence as an example: “If we teach a child to read too early, he may struggle to read well later.”

“He” stands in the place of “child,” who could be either a boy or a girl.

Surprised by my friend’s reasoning, I asked a couple of my grammarian friends if they had encountered this same concern. Maybe their being British had some bearing on my findings, but each emphatically said, "No!"

If you read Mr. Gwynne's Grammar, a best seller in England, you will find a section on the use of the pronoun "he." Mr. Gwynne makes a point of differentiating between “sex” and “gender,” the word “sex being a purely biological term and the word “gender” being a purely grammatical term.

“The word to indicate whether someone is male or female is ‘sex,’ not ‘gender,’ which is purely a grammatical term.”

— Mr. Gwynne

Basic Grammar

Assigning gender to a noun is woven into the structure of many languages, including the Romance languages. The gender of a noun will determine which form of an adjective or pronoun should accompany it.

For example, in Latin, “mensa” is a feminine noun that means "table.” To say " the beautiful table," we use the adjective’s feminine form of “beautiful” to agree with the feminine gender of “table,” hence, “mensa pulchra.”

French, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese and Romanian follow a similar structure.

As you can see, gender in language has nothing to do with an individual's biological or wishful sex regardless of claims to the contrary, although there is of course some overlap when human beings and animals of the female sex are being referred to.

As reason would have it, therefore, the correct use of the pronoun "he," to stand in place of a noun that could be of either sex, is not sexist but is grammatically correct.

“I’ve studied authoritarianism for a very long time - for 40 years - and they’re started by people’s attempts to control the ideological and linguistic territory”

— Jordan Peterson

Language Does Matter

Using language correctly does matter.

Our language is the means through which we understand ourselves and the world in which we live. When we start meddling with one of its basic units, we do so with potentially disastrous results, such as being confused about the biological difference of a man or a woman.

There's a sort of madness at play here.

My point is that if you are a homeschooling parent teaching your child English grammar, please teach him that "he" is a centuries-old pronoun and cannot be replaced with “they".

Instead, teach your child that “he” replaces the antecedent noun when the noun could be of either sex, and we cannot afford to lose him!

☞ Disclaimer: This is not a politically-correct blog.

Don’t miss our free download, Ten Books Every Well-Educated Child Should Read.

When you join the Smart Homeschooler Academy online course for parents of school-age children, we guide you in homeschooling with the classics to raise more intelligent children of a better character.

Enroll using the link below and feel confident knowing you have the guidance and support you need to homeschool successfully.

For parents of children under age seven who would like to prepare their child for social and academic success, please begin with our online course, Raise Your Child to Thrive in Life and Excel in Learning.

Elizabeth Y. Hanson is an Educator, Homeschool Emerita, Writer, and a Love and Leadership Certified Parenting Coach with 20+ years of experience working in children’s education.

Utilizing her unusual skill set, Elizabeth has developed a comprehensive understanding of how to raise and educate a child. She devotes her time to helping parents to get it right.

She is available for one-on-one consultations as needed.

“Elizabeth has given us counseling and guidance to help us succeed with our home school planning. When I feel overwhelmed, scared, or lose my confidence, she offers words of wisdom and support.”

— Sherry B., Pittsburg, PA

Your Children Must Learn to Write Verse!*

According to Mr. Gwynne (of GwynneTeaching.com and the author of Gwynne’s Grammar), all schoolchildren in England, century after century, used to be taught how to write verse. Back then, writing verse was considered an elemental component of an elementary education

How many adults do you know today who can write verse? Allow me to answer that question for you. Most likely, none.  At least, not classical verse, which is the topic under discussion in what follows.

Fundamental opening question: what exactly is real verse, classical verse?

Let us begin by looking at what of modern verse, more commonly known as "free verse," consists of, and, after that, do the same for traditional verse. 

Free verse is when someone takes a thought and writes it in a style that may or may not offer a vague hint of traditional poetry, but pays no attention to the rules of traditional poetry, and in consequence is not, technically speaking, poetry at all.

Let's look at an example of free verse: this, from T. S. Eliot’s “The Hollow Men”:

 We are the hollow men

 We are the stuffed men

 Leaning together

 Headpiece filled with straw. Alas!

 Our dried voices, when

 We whisper together

 Are quiet and meaningless

 As wind in dry grass

 Or rats' feet over broken glass

 In our dry cellar

“Free verse proliferated in the twentieth century because it was “modernistic”, secular and easier to write; but it moved poetry closer and closer to prose until it reached the point when it was no longer possible to tell the difference when read aloud.”

— Geoff Ward, Academic

Now, let me give you an example of traditional verse, in the first stanza of Robert Frost’s poem “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening”:

Whose woods these are, 

I think I know,

His house is in 

The village though

He will not see 

Me sitting here, 

To watch his woods

Fill up with snow.

Please read it two or three times out loud to get a sense of the feel of the poem. That done, now read a later "stanza" of T. S. Eliot’s “The Hollow Men”:

Let me be no nearer

In death's dream kingdom

Let me also wear

Such deliberate disguises

Rat's coat, crowskin, crossed staves

In a field

Behaving as the wind behaves

No nearer-

Please read that "poem" out loud two or three times too. 

Notice that, in the genuine poem by Frost, there is an exactness in the number of units that each line is divided into. In consequence, the poem has a rhythm. By contrast, in Eliot's "poem" nothing is measured at all; there is no rhythm of any kind. It could perhaps be not unfairly described as a free-flowing regurgitation of thought. 

 In Eliot's "poem" each line simply has as many feet (units) as Eliot happened to feel like giving it. Far from there being any coherent structure to the “poem”, each "stanza" has an indeterminate number of lines broken up into lines at random – which, by any traditional definition or practice, simply is not poetry.

“Led mainly by Ezra Pound in the United States, and quickly followed by T. S. Eliot in England with “The Waste Land,” both meter and and rhyming were abandoned, first by very few and then by more and more until where we are today, when they are scarcely to be seen today in published poetry.”

— Mr. N. M. Gwynne

In summary of the essential difference between classical poetry and modern poetry-so-called that we have arrived at: what is referred to as free verse is -- by contrast with traditional, true poetry -- in reality no different from prose. In no way, shape or form does modern so-called poetry bear any real resemblance to poetry as traditionally recognized over the past several thousand years dating back to Homer and before. 

Please think about this, good readers. For centuries—no, for millennia—the term “poetry” was given to a particular type of writing that met certain exacting criteria; whereas, by contrast, as with so many things in our “brave new world,” we have kept the name, but completely lost its meaning. 

Might you perhaps be wondering if I am exaggerating? Well, consider the modern Orwellian tendency of so many people in today’s world to adjust the meaning of terms to suit our version of reality.  

Homeschooling no longer means schooling at home outside schooling institutions. Now included as constituents of homeschooling are charter schools and online virtual public schools. Parents who want to be called "homeschoolers" no longer need to do their own teaching of their children, and to do it at home, as traditional homeschoolers have always done in the past, but can now enroll their children in a school and still call themselves "homeschoolers."

A mother is now called a "primary care giver." Anyone who cares for the same child while the mother works is also called a primary care giver, even though he or she is not the mother. (The implication here is that anyone can fulfill a child's need for his mother, which is not true.) 

Homosexuality, originally called “one of the four sins crying out to Heaven for vengeance” in traditional catechisms, more recently rated as “a carnal sin,” and then, more recently still, defined as a mental illness, is now considered to be nothing more than a lifestyle choice. Fundamentally  it is not a choice of lifestyle, however. At root, it is a choice of sexual activity, full stop.

Words frame our realities, something it would behove us not to forget. We need to work diligently to preserve our language and thereby, ultimately, to preserve our reality, and poetry is one of the means by which we can do this. The words that make up a poem, however, must be more than free-flowing. They must be used with precision, in accordance with the rules governing poetry.

While it is true that words can change their meanings over time, nevertheless, if we are to preserve our perennial understanding of reality, a tree  should always remain a tree and a rose should always remain a rose. When we state that a tree is no longer a tree and a rose no longer a rose, we have, whether intentionally or otherwise, altered our reality.

And when reality is altered in a way that decreases our intellectual powers and our heart-felt sensibilities, as the meaning of the word “poetry” has been altered in recent times, should we not oppose, even fight, the change?

Mr. Gwynne thinks that we should. According to Mr. Gwynne (in the U.S. edition of his book Gwynne’s Grammar):

In order to be categorized as verse,

(1) the verse has to be made up of lines, and each line has to have a fixed number of accents or stresses, and each accent has to have a fixed number of unstressed syllables, one or two, attached to it, and

(2) each line has to be divided into feet and each foot has to have a specific combination of accented – stressed -- syllables and unaccented syllables.

If it has a regular meter and regularly rhymes at various intervals, it is called "rhyming verse." If it has a regular meter but does not rhyme, it is called "blank verse." Verse of either kind is what verse has always been in the past and what it must always remain in future in order to be justifiably referred to as “verse.”

To determine if a piece of writing is truly a poem, rather than prose posing as a poem, the reader must be able to "scan" the poem. That is to say, the reader must be able to determine how many feet (see above) per line the poem has and where the accents/stresses in each foot are placed. There are various forms of meter, but, to write poetry, you must use with precision whatever meters you decide to use. 

Composing a true poem demands that you choose words for each line (1) that fit your meter and (2) the stresses of which (in each word) fall on the correct syllable of whatever word is used in any particular place, and never on the wrong syllable. To do this successfully is genuinely demanding for the brain. 

Robert Frost had to think hard and carefully about each line in the poem that he was composing; T. S. Eliot minimally so by comparison. 

Adequately skilled poets know that they cannot just pick any word and put it anywhere in the sentence that seems fitting at first sight. Such poets know that each word must have a precise position in the sentence that “works” if the sentence is to succeed with its readers. They need to give careful thought to finding the exact word for in the line of the poem that it is needed for, and then to fit it in exactly the right place there.

Let us now have another look at that opening of the first stanza of Robert Frost’s “Stopping by Woods…”: 

Whose woods these are, 

I think I know,

His house is in 

The village though…

Can you “hear” that each line has four units, and that the accent is on the second and the fourth syllable in each line, creating a rhythm and natural flow to the line; so that it rolls comfortably off your tongue as you read it?

That of course is not mere accident, but exactly what Frost intended. The poem is regarded as a classic and has stood the test of time partly because it is a poem that follows traditional rules for verse. Following traditional rules of verse is an essential part of poetry that is genuinely glorious, as well as of poetry that is “merely” good poetry! 

Now let us return to that first stanza of Eliot’s:

 We are the hollow men

 We are the stuffed men

 Leaning together

 Headpiece filled with straw. Alas!

 Our dried voices, when

 We whisper together

 Are quiet and meaningless

 As wind in dry grass

 Or rats' feet over broken glass

 In our dry cellar

Line one has three feet; line two has three feet with a different rhythm; line three has two feet; line four has four feet; line five has three feet; line six has two and a half feet; line seven has three feet; line eight has three feet of a different form from those of line seven; line nine has four feet;  line ten has two and a half feet.

If you were to look, stanza by stanza, through the whole "poem" (most of which I have not quoted), you would also find that each "stanza" has a different number of lines.  

There is no flow or rhythm to Eliot’s words. There are some clever phrases, such as "We are the hollow men, We are the stuffed men,” but a clever phrase here and there is not sufficient to make genuine poetry. 

Also, the stresses are out of joint and, as one reads through the “poem,” the sounds feel jerky to the ear. It may be considered good writing, though even that is arguable, but it is not poetry.

Poetry is a science as much as it is an art. There is both a mathematical and a grammatical element to it,  and if either of those two elements is neglected, let alone if both of them are, a poem cannot be competent, let alone great. Meaningful, it might possibly be, but it cannot belong to the category of poem!

Let us look at two more stanza's, each by a different poet. Make your judgement as to which of them needed the greater intelligence and skill and intellectual prowess for its composition, and then move on to where I tell you who wrote them:

There is a change—and I am poor;

Your love hath been, nor long ago,

A fountain at my fond heart's door,

Whose only business was to flow;

And flow it did; not taking heed

Of its own bounty, or my need.

*     *     *

“I have a lover with hair that falls

like autumn leaves on my skin.

Water that rolls in smooth and cool

as anesthesia. Birds that carry

all my bullets into the barrel of the sun.”

If you said the last poem, well, perhaps. It  was written by the upcoming, contemporary "poet," Brian Turner. Turner actually won some literary recognition for his poetry. 

Now, may the real poet, out of the two of them, stand up. William Wordsworth: the first of the two verses above is from his poem “The Complaint.”

I rest my case. 

Your children should learn to write verse for several reasons.

1. Learning to write good verse produces good writers.

2. It expands your vocabulary and your understanding of the precise meaning of words.

3. It helps to preserve the English language, the language of great writers such as George Gascoigne, William Shakespeare  and John Milton. 

4. Learning to write good verse compels the writer to learn how to turn a phrase well; a skill without which, if you do not master it, you can never be a great writer, and with which, if you do master it, could bring you into the catalogue of the most remembered writers of all time. 

To turn a clever phrase -- to say things with an eloquence, a profundity and a beauty in a way no one has ever achieved with them before -- will improve even your prose one-hundred fold.  Examples of such achievements:

"They were the best of times, they were the worse of times." -- Charles Dickens

“We are such stuff as dreams are made on, and our little life is rounded with a sleep.” – William Shakespeare

“Solitude sometimes is best society.”  -- John Milton

*This blog post is a combined effort of both myself (Elizabeth) and Mr. Gwynne. While I wrote the article, Mr. Gwynne kindly edited it and thereby improved upon it significantly, to which I owe him many thanks.

10 Books Every Concerned Parent Should Read

The world is a little topsy-turvy right now especially when it comes to raising and educating our children.

The following books were carefully chosen as a guide to help you navigate some of the issues you will face as a parent living in the West.

1. Hold On to Your Kids by Gordon Neufeld and Gabor Mate, M.D.

In trying to understand why children no longer revere their parents in the same way that my parent's generation revered their parents, I turned to Neufeld and Mate's book, Hold On to Your Kids.

Part of the answer lies within the pages of this book and will help you understand why peer pressure is so real, and how you can lose your children to peer pressure. It also contains some suggestions for how to protect the bond between you and your children. 

While their solutions are somewhat naive, if I may be so bold as to say that, the authors delineate a very real situation that every parent should understand.

2. Recovering the Lost Tools of Learning by Dorothy Sayers

This essay is Dorothy Sayer's famous critique of modern education using her great wit and brilliant insight. It's amusing as well as informative.

To raise the standard for your child's education, you need first to understand what level of academic work he's capable of doing. There's no better way to do this than to ignore the standards of modern education, and, instead, look at what school children used to learn. 

3. The Disappearance of Childhood by Neil Postman

Neil Postman was a perceptive social critic who argued that childhood was disappearing. The reason for the disappearance was the blurred lines that technology created by exposing children to the adult world too soon.

With the loss of childhood also came the loss of adulthood, which continues to present a significant problem for our society's ability to remain civil. 

4. Gwynne's Latin by N. M. Gwynne - The Introduction

Mr. Gwynne is an expert on the subject of the Latin language. He tells stories of having studied Latin for 90 minutes a day, five days a week as a schoolboy.

By the time I (and later, you) went to school, they had eliminated Latin from the curriculum. To our detriment, too, because without the study of Latin, you can never fully understand or appreciate the English language. 

People who learn Latin are better educated. It's a simple fact. The reason you should read his introduction to his Latin book is that he will give you an irrefutable argument for why you should have your children learn Latin. You can study it, too, as I do–it's never too late.

5. The Underground History of American Education by John Taylor Gatto

Gatto's opus work tells the story of how a sub-standard modern education came to be, and why you must understand it's origins so you can make informed decisions for your children when it comes to deciding how you want to educate them. 

I prefer Gatto's original work over the newly revised work of the same title. Buy a copy of the older book, if you can. His newer version was written during his last years, and intended as a three-volume set, but, sadly, he never finished it. 

6. The Platonic Tradition by Peter Kreeft

You may be wondering why I included this title? It's vital to Western civilization that we understand the ideas upon which our civilization was built so that we can protect them when they're under threat of being undermined as they are today.

We also need to pass this understanding onto our children, so they are not easily swayed by the high falutin rhetoric that robs us of our civil liberties under the guise of equality. Kreeft's book will correct the errors in understanding that brought us to where we are today.

7. Glow Kids by Nicholas Kardaras, Ph.D.

A ground-breaking book that exposes the technology industry for what it is, and the harm it's inflicting on our children during their most vulnerable years. Protect your child by reading this book and passing it on to your friends to read. We need a no-tech revolution, at least no tech in the lives of children. 

8. How to Read a Book by Mortimer Adler and Charles Van Doren

The title seems like an oxymoron, but it's not. The authors acknowledge our ability to read but also our failure to read with deep understanding. We were never taught the skill of reading beyond a rudimentary level, and this is the gap How to Read a Book attempts to fill. 

They will show you how to tackle a book in a way that will make it your own. Especially if you plan on homeschooling, you want to learn this skill so you can teach it to your children when they get older. 

9. Dumbing Us Down by John Taylor Gatto

Dumbing Us Down was Gatto's landmark book when he first entered the world of non-schooling education. He writes an easy-to-read book about the problems with modern education and why you should consider alternatives to a "school-like" training for your child.

Whether you do or not, you should understand the system so you can help your child navigate it if you decide to put him or her into school.

10. The Leipzig Connection by Paolo Lionni

How modern psychology removed the soul from the study of psychology and then coupled that soul-less subject with the department of modern education and the subsequent impact it has had on children's education. An important read!

Some of these books are inexpensive, some are more expensive, but they are all worth reading.

Receive a free download with the titles and links to 10 Books Every Concerned Parent Should Read.

Join the Smart Homeschooler Academy to learn how to give your child an elite education at home.

Elizabeth Y. Hanson is a Love and Leadership certified parenting coach with 17 years experience working in children’s education. She has two successfully homeschooled children in college.

Raise a Smarter Kid with This Simple Practice

The Practice

A strong memory is the foundation of high intelligence. Having young children to memorize rhymes and poetry is an excellent way to develop their memories and their intellects.

Once they are in the formal years of instruction, you can have them memorize wise maxims and worthy passages from different books too. 

Children who are raised with the habit of doing memory work will become accustomed to it, and not shy away from it when they're older. Young children particularly love to memorize anything, so this is the prime time to do memory work with them.

“Let us not then lose even the earliest period of life, and so much the less, as the elements of learning depend on the memory alone, which not only exists in children, but is at that time of life even most tenacious.”

— Marcus Fabius Quintilianus

They won't see it as a difficult task or an impossible task like children do today, but they'll tackle it with determination, and they'll succeed which will have the added effect of building their confidence.

A Declining Skill

A useful skill that memorization teaches us is the ability to focus. In an age of constant distraction, focusing on anything for more than a second is under siege. 

There is no quicker way to lay waste to our memories than by distraction. If we aren't present in our actions and our thoughts, we shall fail to store them in our minds. This is true for our children too.

As mothers, we tend to set a bad example for our children on this point. It happens when we have young children demanding our attention while we're trying to focus on something else.

We get pulled into too many directions, which is why you often hear women complain of a declining memory after they have children. 

(Protecting your memory is another good reason to raise your children to figure things out for themselves, and thereby reduce the number of times you're interrupted during the day.)

We want to protect our children from having weak memories by starting them with memory work even before they begin grade school. Around age four would be a good time to start.

A Happy Spirit

Keep it light and fun though–you never want to put undue pressure on a child’s budding heart.

Read rhymes over and over again, and your children will memorize them without effort. Read age-appropriate poetry to your children and have them learn short stanzas by heart.

When you go to the grocery store, introduce a memory game. Have your children memorize the shopping list. You can learn it, too, and then see who remembers most of the items on the list. 

Children love this game especially since they usually win!

Learn by Heart

Memory work, or learning by heart, as it was once called, was a vital component of the Ancient Greek and Roman education. The Greeks and Romans had sophisticated memory tools to facilitate the learning by heart of epic poems.

For example, every school child in Ancient Greece would learn The Iliad and The Odyssey by heart. 

When children learn things by heart, it also helps to form their characters and their world views, which is precisely why the Greeks had their children learn epic poems about their heroes by heart.

“Learning by heart’, which speaks to the soul, has been replaced by ‘rote-learning’ and ‘learning by rote’, which are disparaging and off-putting terms that have the effect of making memorizing into a matter of using the brain as a piece of machinery.”

— Mr. Gwynne

Today, we don't have children learn anything by heart in school anymore. Not only this, but we use the term “rote” memorization and speak condescendingly of it.

Did you learn anything by heart? I never did. 

The Memory Disadvantage

Yet, the memory is a crucial component of our intelligence. People who have weaker memories are at an intellectual disadvantage over those who have strong memories.

Why would we raise our children to be at a disadvantage when they're natural inclination is to develop their memories? 

It's like preventing a child from learning to walk. Why would we physically handicap them? We wouldn’t, nor should we handicap them intellectually by failing to train their memories.

It's our job as parents and teachers to provide our children with memory work, yet, we overlook this vital element to education because "rote" memorizing is not an effective way to teach.

Rote memory work, as Mr. Gwynne points out, is not the proper term anyway. Learning by heart is a much more humane way to look at an easy method of training your child's mind to do great things. 

In our misguided efforts to spare our children the boredom of memory work, are we not dumbing them down?

Have you got your free copy of How to Raise a More Intelligent Child and an Excellent Reader? It comes with an 80+ book list of carefully chosen books to support your child’s intellectual development.

Join Elizabeth’s signature parenting course: Raise Your Child Well to live a life he loves.

Elizabeth Y. Hanson is a Love and Leadership certified parenting coach with 17 years experience working in children’s education.