An interesting anecdote from Diane Ravitch's excellent Left Back: A Century of Battles Over School Reform, the occasion for which is Ravitch's discussion of how early educational psychologists affected ideas about whether it was possible to train children to remember accurately and reason well:

The first attempt to test the validity of mental discipline was recorded by the eminent Harvard psychologist William James, who conducted a trial of his own memory. He wanted to see 'whether a certain amount of daily training in learning poetry by heart will shorten the time it takes to learn an entirely different kind of poetry.' During an eight-day period, he memorized 158 lines of Victor Hugo's poem "Satyr" at the rate of one line every fifty seconds; then, over a thirty-eight day period, he memorized the first book of Paradise Lost. When he returned to the Hugo poem, it took him fifty-seven seconds to memorize each line, which indicated that he had gained nothing in speed or efficiency from his earlier memory feats. While James thought that one's memory might be improved by various methods, he doubted that the faculty of memory could be strengthened merely by training. He referred to his self-test in a footnote to his monumental work The Principles of Psychology.

'You are old, Father William,' the young man said,
'And your hair has become very white;
And yet you incessantly stand on your head -
Do you think, at your age, it is right?'

'In my youth,' Father William replied to his son,
'I feared it might injure the brain;
But, now that I'm perfectly sure I have none,
Why, I do it again and again.'

'You are old,' said the youth, 'as I mentioned before,
And have grown most uncommonly fat;
Yet you turned a back-somersault in at the door -
Pray, what is the reason of that?'

'In my youth,' said the sage, as he shook his grey locks,
'I kept all my limbs very supple
By the use of this ointment - one shilling the box -
Allow me to sell you a couple?'

'You are old,' said the youth, 'and your jaws are too weak
For anything tougher than suet;
Yet you finished the goose, with the bones and the beak -
Pray how did you manage to do it?'

'In my youth,' said his father, 'I took to the law,
And argued each case with my wife;
And the muscular strength, which it gave to my jaw,
Has lasted the rest of my life.'

'You are old,' said the youth, 'one would hardly suppose
That your eye was as steady as ever;
Yet you balanced an eel on the end of your nose -
What made you so awfully clever?'

'I have answered three questions, and that is enough,'
Said his father; 'don't give yourself airs!
Do you think I can listen all day to such stuff?
Be off, or I'll kick you down stairs!'

The full complement of Carroll's nonsensical rewrites--which may be read at least in part as tongue-in-cheek meditations on rote memorization--is collected here.