A while back while debating a bright 24-year-old on Canadian radio about the benefits and harms of digital habits, I played up the no-tech exercises I assign students, including the study and recitation of verse. “Yeah,” I said, in old-fogey tones, “I make sophomores memorize 20-plus lines of their own choosing out of the anthology every few weeks and vocalize them to the class the next meeting. It’s good for their minds and characters.”

The other guest jumped on the task. “Please,” she observed [I’m paraphrasing]. “Teachers need to realize that we’re in a different era, and that they can’t expect their students to sit back and take in what they or the book says and just regurgitate it.” It’s an old point going a century back to the progressives and their objections to “drill-and-kill.” The latest technology has provided a new argument against it.

In a digital age, it goes, students demand more interactivity, more initiative and creativity in the learning process. What could be worse than memorizing others’ words?

The problem with this outlook is that it misconstrues the memorization of verse (or any other kind of eloquence) as a mechanical procedure. It casts memory and response as robotic, a Gradgrind oppression.

Consider, however, what goes into the process, and what benefits derive from it.

1. Memory is a muscle. The more you exercise it, the stronger it gets. The more you practice it, the more tricks and tactics you discover. Memory is an art as well as an act, and as with any art form it improves with repetition.

2. Memorization of language slows you down. It makes you pay close attention to the verbal surface, so that you can’t slide past the details. Figures of speech, parentheses, and punctuation demand notice. The eye and ear have to sharpen. In a world of accelerating reading, writing, speaking, and listening, that slow reading workout becomes all the more important.

3. It builds vocabulary. If you don’t know what words mean, you can’t remember and recite them effectively.

4. It accustoms students to public speaking, which so many of them regard with fear and trembling.

5. It supplies young people a reservoir of better utterances. A little exposure to the words of Dickinson, Wordsworth, and the rest grants them a healthy alternative to the puerile patter of social networking.

6. Finally, it forces young people out of themselves, if only for a moment. To grasp the voice of the poem, they have to throw themselves into the experience of the speaker. With so much of digital youth culture fostering self-involvement and self-display, a little imagination of other selves far from their own condition helps curb the narcissism.

Se let’s have more of it. The more students groan and resist and assert, “Why do this when we can always call up that Frost poem with a few clicks?” the more they need the practice.