An Open Letter From A Granny

Recently I wrote a .letter to my granddaughter who is studying 7th grade. Her final term exams are fast approaching and as usual I gave her some tips. But this time the emphasis was different.

Like many people now-a-days, she also thinks that learning lessons by heart is bad and that she should write only in her own words.Sometimes, say for a Science,definition, it may be difficult.and the student may lose marks for not giving the exact words.

I made her understand that it is not a sin to learn by heart.

I thought that I would share what I wrote to her so that the importance of memorizing as  a learning tool can be appreciated...

                                                          Save in  memory

Some people think that learning lessons by heart, i.e by rote is not good practice.

If it was considered like that, we Indians would have lost our rich heritage of scriptures  and literature.

All the Vedas, puranas, ithihasas like Ramayana and Mahabharatha, ancient Tamil literature like Sangam poetry of which we are proud of would have been lost. These were passed on from generation to generation of teachers and students by learning by heart and reciting from memory.

Of course they were written sometimes on palm leaves for preservation. But writing on palm leaves with a stylus  was a difficult task and the skill was mastered by very few. The students used palm leaves very sparingly, only to take copies of their masters’ work.

For learning the alphabets they wrote on sand spread on level ground.

Every morning before sunrise the students would assemble at the guru’s place. They would recite in chorus the lessons taught earlier. The Guru would then start on the next lesson.

Learning by heart was made easier by various techniques. The students were told to repeat the poems (Of Vedas) backwards and forwards in various combinations of words like stringing flowers in a garland in a particular order. These were named as Gana Parayanam or Jata Parayanam according to the way in which the words were grouped.This helped them memorizing easier.

Another technique was, each of the students was told to recite poems one by one. When one student finishes, the next has to start a poem whose first letter is the last letter of the previous poem. more or less like the Anthakshari game.

This, they would do while performing their daily chores like going to the river bank for a wash or collecting flowers for the puja of the Guru. The students enjoyed this kind of recital as they considered it as a game.

They learnt the lessons like this at the young age of about seven to fifteen and everything went into the memory indelibly. However, they proceeded to learn the meanings explanations and commentaries for all the texts as they grew older and understood and applied them to their life.

Thus learning and understanding were   in two stages with respect to the great works like Vedas.

The teachers made it a point to drive home essential morals and ethics of life by stories and anecdotes which were easy for the young student to understand and follow.

There were dictionaries / thesaurus giving meanings of words. But these dictionaries were also learnt by heart. Each student had to memorise two dictionaries, one for Sanskrit and the other for Tamil. They were called Koshas(treasury) or Nigandu.

Thus by the hard work of our ancient scholars we are now lucky to have the very vast treasury of scriptures and literature and be proud of them and benefit by them.

Now we are able to learn write, print and reproduce in vast numbers at the click of a button.

Even now we save in memory, but of a different kind!