Book Explores Decline Of Rote Poetry Memorization In US Schools

The Boston Globe (10/14, Graham) reviews "Heart Beats: Everyday Life and the Memorized Poem" by Catherine Robson, noting, "In the one-room-schoolhouse years of American education, Robson explains, recitation was the default teaching method in every subject," and "poetry in particular was thought to have a special power to comfort, elevate, and refine the children who memorized it. ... By the 1960s, however, mandatory memorization began to decline, a change fueled both by new pedagogical theories and the changing forms and social role of poetry."