by Eva van Loon -Cognition Therapist
In the poetic last scene of the old film Fahrenheit 451, exiles who have committed the twin sins of literacy and critical thinking walk about their fogged-in hidden habitat repeating entire books to themselves. Each fugitive from “justice” and “civilisation” chooses to become the living text of a favorite, excellent book—that is the salvage plan for humankind and its culture.
It’s a scene to move teachers to tears.
Educators have wrung their hands over the perceived loss of literacy (and numeracy) for three or four decades now. A society where half the population cannot
grok a printed page, much less produce one, is a frightening manifestation of Jane Jacobs’ warnings in
Dark Age Ahead. To be one of a literate few reduces the good reader to a stranger in a strange land.
Despite a legion of well-intentioned programs designed to get kids
excited about reading, literacy levels continue their general decline, according to standard tests. Every program works…a little…for some, but nothing does the trick entirely.
A frequent complaint about reading programs concerns their dumbed-down, trivial content, as if literature is too difficult for the learning reader, as if poets and writers must all have been literacy stars before they set down one immortal word. The
boring, boring! contents of these programs fail to deliver the savor of our collective wisdom and experience. Worse, a reading program without poetry severs literature from music and math, and ignores a world of histories in which the poem and the song antedate the written word.
As a cognition therapist, I take the novel view that balance, rhythm, and memory are the indispensable tripod supporting both literacy and numeracy. If proprioception is skewed and there’s brain hemisphericity going on, a learner’s bound for trouble with reading and math.
Poetry, with its memory tricks and musicality, might offer a gateway into the land of the learned—it certainly can’t hurt.
Scholars still argue whether Homer, ancient Greek author of the incredibly long poems the
Iliad and Odyssey, was literate. Quite likely, he sang those tales so often that the rhythms, rhymes, and themes of this oral/aural tradition prompted his memory each time. His audience expected to hear many of his poetic tricks and derived pleasure from what he did with them each performance.
Not for nothing did we coin the phrase, “That’s music to my ears” for good news.
Although literacy has become so integral to our culture that some poems now need to be seen on the page to be understood (think e.e. cummings), the aural/oral tradition of poetry springs up again and again like a cowlick on the collective human scalp. Sound poems, rap, poetry slams—oh no, you can’t keep those poems down!
You don’t have to read to invent them, either.
Poetry was the gatekeeper to literacy when God was a kid (think of the poetic bits of the Bible, probably aural/oral before someone wrote them down). Poetry, unlike the economy, doesn’t need literacy to survive.
If we want literate youth, we must honor poetry, especially upstart poetry. Teach our children well: feed those aural/oral roots by hearing, making, singing, and reading poetry every chance you get.
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