Our Latin teacher, Captain Hogarth, a psychologically scarred veteran of some great, distant battle, would whack us over the palms with his leather-bound swagger stick if we so much as fudged a dative. “Sine labore nihil!” he would bawl – nothing without work. Yes, those were the days. How much black energy was pumped into drilling us – quick! 93 times 82 – with the aim, perhaps, of sharpening our reflexes, training us to obey orders. Content was not as important as speed of recall, the unflinching recital under pressure. That is the way wars were won and, if the author Don Tapscott is to be believed, empires lost.

We were aware at the time that rote learning had only limited value in the outside world. Even the football sage Bill Shankly had got the measure of it: “Me havin’ no education, I had to use my brains.” But after leaving school the brighter pupils burst into creative flower while the thicker nonetheless had a toolset – they could multiply in their head, recite verse, understand chemical formulae, spell, sometimes play music by ear – which stayed with them for a lifetime.

The digital age downgrades those without internet access; pre-digitals can operate independently of the computer in part thanks to the tedious rehearsal of facts and figures in their childhood.

The big rote learners – China, India, Singapore – are tiger economies, all too aware of the benefits of the web but able to respond to a changing world because they have the certainties that come with a disciplined human memory. Rote learning is, whatever modern linguists may say, essential for effective language learning.

The combination of our monolingual arrogance and the conviction that rote learning is only for losers has robbed us of a generation of Arabists, who could have helped to disentangle the Middle East. Until the 1960s the Foreign Office brimmed with Arabists; now a school system that puts “creativity” above the exercise of memory has made language learning seem a waste of time. The web, after all, speaks English.

It matters that Napoleon was defeated in 1815, in June, at Waterloo, and it matters that these facts are somehow programmed in the grey cells. Why?

Because the battle would have been fought differently if it had been in December. And because it matters what preceded the battle, in 1814, and what came later, in 1816. Who was writing poetry in 1815? What scientific research was conducted that year? Understanding the world means grasping the principle of synchronicity, the flow of parallel events, the sudden relevance of the obscure and marginal.

Knowing the date of an historical event gives you context, allows you to make connections. Isn’t that what education is about? Teachers who tell you: “Go google!” are abdicating their prime responsibility. Was it a sweat to learn passages of Macbeth by heart? Yes – but it taught me the music of Shakespeare and it remains a pleasure to recite “Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow” in the shaving mirror. It has also equipped my generation to dominate pub quizzes, the quintessential survival skill of Middle England. What is going to happen when the digital grown-ups are stripped of their BlackBerries and put to the test?

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