I had to memorize this poem in high school. I suppose I resented that at the time, but I've not regretted it since.
American education goes through many fads. More than forty years ago when I was in the Capleville, Tennessee, public school, with two grades to a room and some 25 pupils per grade, everyone in the school not only could read but did read. I still have the reader. In fifth grade we were assigned Macauley's "Horatius," and were required to memorize at least this verse:
Then up spake brave Horatius,
The captain of the gate,
'To every man upon this earth,
Death cometh soon or late.
And how can man die better,
Than facing fearful odds,
For the ashes of his fathers,
And the temples of his gods?'
In those days we had no Federal aid to education, and thus couldn't afford fancy books about Dick and Jane and their running dog Spot. We had to read Hiawatha, James Fenimore Cooper, Washington Irving, Huck Finn and Evangeline and the King of the Golden River, Edgar Lee Masters and Stephen Vincent Benet. Of course today's schools have more money, and can buy the improved reading materials written by professors of education. Every pupil gets a textbook. It's probably fortunate for the textbook writers, since few of them publish anywhere else.
Textbooks weren't so common in my time—at least in the less affluent districts. Instead we used the copybook: literally a bound notebook into which one copied materials the teachers thought you ought to learn. The notion was that you'd learn penmanship as well as what you'd copied.
In some cases the material itself wasn't assigned: you'd be given headings, and told to go to the library and copy out something about them. The copybook headings might include history, or poetry, or Proverbs; and sometimes they would include more terrible things. As for instance:
Some say that Darkness was first, and from Darkness sprang Chaos. From a union between Darkness and Chaos sprang Night, Day, Erebrus, and the Air.
From a union between Night and Erebrus sprang Doom, Old Age, Death, Murder, Continence, Sleep, Dreams, Discord, Misery, Vexation, Nemesis, Joy, Friendship, Pity, the Three Fates, and the Three Hesperides.
From a union between Air and Day sprang Mother Earth, Sky, and Sea.
From a union between Air and Mother Earth sprang Terror, Craft, Anger, Strife, Lies, Oaths, Vengeance, Intemperance, Altercation, Treaty, Oblivion, Fear, Pride, Battle; also Oceanus, Metis, and other Titans, Tartarus, and the Three Erinyes, or Furies . . .—Hesiod
(translated by Robert Graves)
We were supposed to take each of those as a heading. Doubtless it did much for my vocabulary. And to this day I remember that it was the particular task of Nemesis to punish hubris, or overweening pride, by visiting her victim with catastrophe.