That’s what’s expected of students today. Why should it be significantly different 200 years in the future?
The thing is, learning of other people's words by rote is actually a fairly rare phenomenon in modern educational systems in Europe. Students may do it as a hobby in places, but I've never heard of people of my generation being expected to learn literature that way here in Finland or Sweden, or in northern Germany, or in the Balkans, and it apparently isn't that big in Spain, either.
It sounds like a very British thing, really, at least per popular culture references. It goes against a couple of modern values by assuming that a) bygone people were better than us, b) their supposed wisdom needs to be carried over with each syllable accurately reproduced, and c) once adopted, the wisdom should be mentally preserved in the "original" (although in practice much-mangled) form rather than adapted for modern considerations.
There's no comparable text a Finn would need to learn by rote, no pledge of allegiance, no ancient wording of a founding document. There are songs and poems that are voluntary material (say, the national anthem), and a couple of catchphrases that help you through modern political satire, but only students of literature would be expected to know their Shakespeare or national writers, and even they never have any practical use for that knowledge anyway.
This is a modern phenomenon, to be sure - a counterreaction to centuries of doing it the British way. It would well be possible for the learning by rote to be abandoned worldwide within the next 200 years and condemned as counterproductive. Or then it might bounce back if we see TOS as representing a society where conservative British values are once again on the rise.
Timo Saloniemi
