reply to u/coffeetoffee92 at https://reddit.com/r/ClassicalEducation/comments/1sxcw5m/well_trained_mind_ancient_history_facts_for/<br /> RE: rote memorization of historical dates

I've not read Bauer, but I'll suspect that she doesn't teach "serious" rhetoric, much less the fourth canon: memory. She's likely relying on the post-Ramus (15th Century) method of rote memorization rather than the methods used from ancient Greece through Augustine, Aquinas, and Llull.

I'd start with some mnemonic methods like the method of loci or the Major System to make it much easier for the kid to begin scaffolding memory techniques and make it easier for them to memorize those facts you're talking about.

For the memory piece, I'd start first with one of the most wide-ranging:

Kelly, Lynne. 2019. Memory Craft: Improve Your Memory Using the Most Powerful Methods from around the World. Pegasus Books.

Many of the older classics on memory also include long lists of historically important dates to use. Grey is a good example:

Grey, Richard (1694-1771). 1799. Memoria Technica, or, A New Method of Artificial Memory. W. Lowndes. https://archive.org/details/memoriatechnica03greygoog/page/n2/mode/2up.

https://www.reddit.com/r/learnwelsh/comments/10acr9j/sut_i_ddweud_i_memorized_yn_gymraeg/

Fascinating that the Welsh language doesn't seem to have a direct translatable word/verb for "to memorize". The closest are dysgu (to learn, to teach) and cofio (to remember).

Related phrase: yn dysgu cerddi ar gof (to learn poems by heart), though this last is likely a more direct translation of an English concept back into Welsh.

Is this lack of a seemingly basic word for such a practice a hidden indicator of the anthropology of their way of knowing?

If to learn something means that one fully memorizes it from the start, then one needn't sub-specify, right?

Pedagogical cultrues:

• cultures taught orally
• cultures taught to remember
• cultures taught to learn by rote
• cultures taught to forget

Is there a (linear) progression? How do they differ? How are they they same? Is there a 1-1 process that allows them to be equivalence classes?