Underlying the generally oblivious attitude of teachers and learners towards the past is insufficient respect for the role of memory in giving meaning to experience and access to knowledge. We shape our identity by making sense of our past and its relationship to present and future selves, a process that should be intensively cultivated when we…

This is discussion of one of Leo Tolstoy's fictional dramatisations of aggressive but dull-witted pedagogy. In "Anna Karenina," two adults badger a lively, deep-souled, active-minded boy, Anna's son Seryozha, to learn his rote-lessons.

This article considers the practice of learning poems and the value of poetry in the memory, and emerges from the Cambridge Poetry Teaching Project, a small-scale research study co-ordinated through the Faculty of Education at the University of Cambridge. Drawing on the subset of findings in relation to learning and memory, the essay locates the…