When we revered the ideal of America as the melting pot, generations of immigrant children learned to speak the same language, memorizing poems that marked common reference points. This brought us all together in the new land. Memorizing a poem was a great equalizer because it focused on the sounds of the English language, enabling the struggle to understand the meanings of the words. Adolescents delighted in calling on quotes from Shakespeare to suit the occasion. When troubled over a rejection of the heart, a smitten lad might recite, in mock hyperbole, "To be or not to be." In fact, Hamlet's entire soliloquy was often committed to memory.

Any parent who reads Dr. Seuss to young children discovers how quickly youngsters mimic and memorize the funny combination of sounds: "Mr. Brown can moo. Can you moo like I moo?" Many of these same parents balk at the idea of rote memorization when their children get to school, unable to see how it encourages mental agility. Educationists support this attitude with ridiculous notions that memorization stifles creativity, inhibits free expression and encourages attitudes of rigidity and servility.

Current intellectual fashions that challenge the value of memorizing come from esoteric and fashionable literary theorists who subscribe to "constructivism," ideas stemming from Jean Piaget, the Swiss child psychologist, who insists that there is no such thing as "objective knowledge" and that children should "construct" knowledge for themselves. Memorization in this formulation deprives children of independent thinking and self-discovery. Anyone who grew up memorizing at least one Shakespeare sonnet, or even "Cat in the Hat," recognizes this notion as absurd.

Some critics blame the electronic age as contributing to the failure of poetry to entice. Yet the "favorite poem project" of the Library of Congress enables us to listen to poets read their poems in cyberspace. How many teachers know how to take advantage of these wonderful readings?

In this summer of our discontent, when we are forced to hear lots of hot air pretending to be genuine rhetoric, listening to a poet or memorizing a favorite verse or two would be welcome and refreshing. We could start with a simple stanza written by Ted Kooser, our new poet laureate, contemplating "starlight" in all its wonder:

All night, this soft rain from
The distant past.
No wonder I sometimes
Waken as a child.