In Georgia students will be required to build "background knowledge" by reciting all or part of significant poems and speeches. The Arkansas plan calls for students to recite a passage from a well-known poem, play or speech. That's it; an old-fashioned demand that students memorize the Gettysburg Address or Hamlet's "To be or not to be" or Gwendolyn Brooks's We Real Cool and recite it to an audience.
Most parents would probably call this a worthy exercise once abandoned for long, gathering the courage to speak in public and firing the adolescent imagination. Who could object to store memorable words in teenage heads otherwise packed with short videos?
English teachers, that's who. Modern educators view memorization as empty repetition, mechanical and prescriptive（规定的） rather than creative or thoughtful. Reciting texts from memory, they say, merely drops information into students' minds. It's repetitive learning instead of critical analysis.
That's wrong. Recitation allows students to experience a text as a living thing, ready to be taken up by a new generation. Committing a poem or speech to memory means stepping into the author's shoes and pondering_what he meant. Deciding which words to stress when reciting means thinking about what those words mean.
In our age of social media and artificial intelligence, the practice of recitation has never been more needed. Memorizing classic words reminds us that they are alive.
Watch the faces of parents as they listen to their children urging us all toward what Martin Luther King called "a dream deeply rooted in the American dream," or saying with Robert Frost, "I have been one acquainted with the night," or with Shakespeare, "Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow..."
When young reciters return to their seats, they know they have made ageless words their own. What parents and students feel at that moment transcends（超越） a good grade. For a few minutes, hardworking teens become King, Frost or Shakespeare.
