WORDS Ann Rennie

What makes learning truly revolutionary?

I loved school. I loved my school, in particular, the school that saw me through from six-year old prep to 18-year old prefect. This was one of the places I learned to be me, to make life-long friends, to build my faith, to believe that the world was waiting for me to take my place in it.

Today, after a late arrival to teaching via a colourful and circuitous career path, I have the privilege of teaching in some of those same classrooms, now refurbished brightly without teacher platforms and chalky blackboards and desks with blackened inkwells.

I still possess my Form 3 essays on To Kill a Mockingbird written in a large round hand, and spattered with the teenage polysyllabic sludge of trying too hard to impress. I had the good fortune to have a wonderful teacher, Ms Hiatt, who gently reminded me that fewer and better words would make for a good essay. Nigh on 40 years later, my daughter is also getting to know Atticus, Scout and Jem Finch and the valuable lesson of walking in someone else's shoes as she hurries up the same long corridors to class.

One of the mantras of that Melbourne convent education at Genazzano in the 1960s was the universal and scary phrase -- 'learning by heart'.

We learnt times tables by heart, poems by heart, the names of planets and river systems and capitals and historic dates by heart. Most especially we learnt our spelling lists off by heart because we had a test every week. Personal mortification for me was a shoddy score of 19 out of 20. I learned by heart the answers to my catechism questions and recited them piously and not merely for the reward of a holy picture which could be swapped on the asphalt at playtime.

Learning by heart meant that we spent the time doing something properly and well. Although there were times when memory failed or performance anxiety clouded our recitation, there was also a satisfaction in being able to understand and retain facts and figures and carry in our minds some of the glories of the language.

For me, though, learning by heart has another meaning which has more resonance than the ability to recall the wives of Henry VIII in correct order, beheadings and all.

We didn't know it at the time, but we were learning by heart to be our best selves, to be considerate of others, to belong to a class and school community. Through the years of our schooling we were learning in our wilful, untutored, open, childish hearts to be a friend in need and in deed.

Learning by heart was very much at the core of the curriculum as the teachers, religious and lay, took the time to really know us. I was always known and named; a little bit teacher's pet because I cleaned the blackboards and joined in and knew more than my prayers. I was encouraged and affirmed and liked and I learned to like myself and like others. This is still at the core of the Catholic school's endeavour – to write on the souls of the next generation.

Robert Frost wrote that he was not a teacher, but an awakener. I was awakened to much in the world around me by those who taught and loved me. They gave me tiny fragments of their hearts when they smiled at me or patted me on the shoulder or cheered me on as I ran third in the 200 metres. They unleashed in me the holy curiosity of which Albert Einstein wrote; the curiosity of finding out more, of reading widely, of experimenting with words and ideas, of performing, of putting in, of looking ahead with hope.

Learning by heart is not something that can be timetabled, but it is a lesson that is easily taught, and caught.

Learning by heart matters because it teaches us that the real lesson of life is love.

We may have had the BER and the DER, but love is still the real education revolution.

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