The book of Proverbs provides the perfect illustration of this. In it we find not only programmatic statements of value like “Better is a little with righteousness than great revenues with injustice” (16:8 ESV), but also observations about human nature like “A worker’s appetite works for him; his mouth urges him on” (16:26). As we explained last time, these are truthful opinions worthy of being shared with the young to help them learn to understand the world around them and to value things rightly. 

Early education should be packed with content of this sort, both directly from the mouths of teachers, but across all the subjects of study. Reading and writing instruction should not merely train in skills but should be rich in moral wisdom. In this way, we can sow the seeds of virtue and wisdom in the young. We have already had occasion to remark on the intimate connection between the moral virtues and practical wisdom. They are two sides of the same coin. As Aristotle says, “the function of man is achieved only in accordance with practical wisdom as well as with moral excellence; for excellence makes the aim right, and practical wisdom the things leading to it” (Nicomachean Ethics VI.12; rev. Oxford trans., 1807). And again, “it is not possible to be good in the strict sense without practical wisdom, nor practically wise without moral excellence” (VI.13, 1808). 

We had to go somewhat far afield, with both John Amos Comenius, the great Czech educational reformer of the 17th century, and Aristotle as our guides, during the last article, in order to establish the necessity of laying this foundation of virtue and prudence in early education. In this article, we will put some flesh on the bones of this “good instruction” by teachers of the young through delineating the role of principles and practice, examples and discipline. 

Principles and Practice

First of all, we can pick up again and dust off the analogy between artistry and morality that we explored while introducing our series on Apprenticeship in the Arts. “Excellences we get by first exercising them,” Aristotle asserts, speaking of the moral virtues which are inextricably tied to prudence, “as also happens in the case of the arts as well. For the things we have to learn before we can do, we learn by doing, e.g. men become builders by building and lyre-players by playing the lyre; so too we become just by doing just acts, temperate by doing temperate acts, brave by doing brave acts” (Nicomachean Ethics II.1, 1743). Practice, in line with the correct principles, will form a person toward either artistry or morality. 

As in apprenticeship in the arts then, laying the appropriate foundation for prudence involves both moral practice and principles. John Amos Comenius emphasized the preliminary role of practice in craftsmanship, and he does the same for each of the other cardinal virtues. Regarding temperance, he says, in his Great Didactic,

“Boys should be taught to observe temperance in eating and in drinking, in sleeping and in waking, in work and in play, in talking and in keeping silence, throughout the whole period of their instruction.

“In this relation the golden rule, ‘Nothing in excess,’ should be dinned into their ears, that they may learn on all occasions to leave off before satiety sets in.” (212)

Temperance constitutes a guiding principle for the ordering of students’ days that parents and teachers should heed. Notice how Comenius draws from traditional wisdom for a principle that should be actively, rather than passively “dinned into their ears.” 

As modernists and postmodernists we are apt to recoil at such tough love, but we would do well to question our assumptions. Either we order their days, emotions, and minds with an open door to intemperance (e.g., playing video games all day, eating unhealthy foods, staying up late into the night, etc.), or we hold the line and cause them to practice temperance day in and day out. Intemperate habituation is no small issue to worry about; as Aristotle said, “It makes no small difference, then, whether we form habits of one kind or of another from our very youth; it makes a very great difference, or rather, all the difference” (Nic Ethics II.1, 1743). 

Apparently moral subtlety is not a virtue for an early education in prudence. Instead Comenius envisions a type of moral catechism with answers drawn from scripture and wise men to provide rules for life (answering questions like “Why should we strive against envy?” “With what arms should we fortify ourselves against the sorrows and chances of life?” “How should we observe moderation in joy?” “How should anger be controlled?” “How should illicit love be driven out?”; 216). These provide the guiding principles to accompany the practice of daily life.

Comenius goes on to delineate the reason for this habituation according to the cardinal virtues. It lies in the rational nature of a human being and therefore develops the proper connection between moral habits and the principled deliberation of prudence:

The principle which underlies this is that we should accustom boys to do everything by reason, and nothing under the guidance of impulse. For man is a rational animal, and should therefore be led by reason, and, before action, ought to deliberate how each operation should be performed, so that he may really be master of his own actions. Now since boys are not quite capable of such a deliberate and rational mode of procedure, it will be a great advance towards teaching them fortitude and self-control if they be forced to acquire the habit of performing the will of another in preference to their own, that is to say, to obey their superiors promptly in everything. (212-213)

For Comenius, obedience to a prudent parent or teacher acts as a preliminary stage in a person’s development of prudential wisdom. Since children cannot be entirely rational in consulting about which operation or act to perform, they should obey their elders, who at the same time explain to them the reasons for why one course of action should be preferred to another. 

Children thus act as moral apprentices through the habit of prompt obedience, practicing the very thing that they will do in later life when they must subordinate the impulsive and emotional part of them to their rational and deliberate mind. Again it must be reiterated that this is not the possession of prudence itself, but it is, in Comenius’ mind, “a great advance” toward it. A development of his playful analogy, sowing the seeds of virtue, helps him explain why:

“Virtue must be inculcated at a very early stage before vice gets possession of the mind.

“For if you do not sow a field with good seed it will produce nothing but weeds of the worst kind. But if you wish to subdue it, you will do so more easily and with a better hope of success if you plough it, sow it, and harrow it in early spring. Indeed, it is of the greatest importance that children be well trained in early youth, since a jar preserves for a long time the odour with which it has been imbued when new.” (215)

For this reason, we can see as injurious the inclination of many parents and teachers, to say of some vice a young child is displaying, “Oh, he’ll grow out of it.” Weeds do not disappear of their own accord but grow and infest the field. The diligent labor of bringing up children involves, first, sowing well the field, but then, harrowing it, as well, breaking up the ground and tearing up the weeds through proper discipline. But we are getting ahead of ourselves.

Examples and Discipline

So far we have explained the importance of providing principles alongside practice to prepare the hearts and minds of students for moral virtue and intellectual prudence. In his Great Didactic Comenius reiterates this Aristotelian emphasis on ‘practice, practice, practice’ as he transitions to a discussion of examples: 

We have seen in chaps. xx. and xxi. that it is by learning that we find out what we ought to learn, and by acting that we learn to act as we should. So then, as boys easily learn to walk by walking, to talk by talking, and to write by writing, in the same way they will learn obedience by obeying, abstinence by abstaining, truth by speaking the truth, and constancy by being constant. But it is necessary that the child be helped by advice and example at the same time. (215)

Just as in other skills and arts, practice according to good principles provides the foundation for prudence. In a similar way to training in artistry, where theory should not crowd out the importance of examples and models, so also in prudence moral exemplars hold a crucial role.

When the classicists among us think of moral exemplars, we might imagine Plutarch’s Lives or Aesop’s fables, the well-known figures of history and literature who demonstrate for us right and wrong behavior in the vivid color of a narrative. And this is right, but Comenius reminds us of the even more living curriculum of the lives of people in the school community: “Examples of well-ordered lives, in the persons of their parents, nurses, tutors, and school-fellows, must continually be set before children” (215). Comenius seems to suggest highlighting virtuous and wise individuals in the community through public praise and story-telling. We could imagine this being done in the classroom or assembly-hall, formally and informally. 

Comenius’ reason for valuing living examples resonates with modern research on mirror neurons and our imitative nature as human beings: 

For boys are like apes, and love to imitate whatever they see, whether good or bad, even though not bidden to do so; and on this account they learn to imitate before they learn to use their minds. By ‘examples,’ I mean living ones as well as those taken from books; in fact, living ones are the more important because they make a stronger impression. And therefore, if parents are worthy and careful guardians of domestic discipline, and if tutors are chosen with the greatest possible care, and are men of exceptional virtue, a great advance will have been made towards the proper training of the young in morals. (215)

We might supplement Comenius statement about children “learning to imitate before they learn to use their minds” with reference to the recent research that links imitation to the foundational emotional and artistic skills, say in mirroring the emotions of another through facial expressions or the hand-grasping movements of another simply by observing (see Patrick’s article The Imitation Brain). This monkey-see, monkey-do (or monkey-feel) may be less than the fully blossomed rationality of prudence, but it is a fundamental and therefore necessary step along the way. 

Parents and teachers must remember that their example and influence will have a real and overarching effect on the moral development of the children under their care. This is not an area where “Do as I say, not as I do” is going to be effective (if there is any domain where that works…). Ironically, it is this personal lack of prudence that contributes to parents’ lack of perseverance in discipline. Did you notice how in the block quote above Comenius transitioned immediately from living examples to the necessity of parents as “worthy and careful guardians of domestic discipline”? In his mind these are connected, because the faithful administration of discipline in the little things of the home functions as an overflow of a prudent and godly life.

In our modern cultural imagination we picture the pickiness of a hot-tempered and unpredictable parent when we think of domestic discipline: e.g., the surly father who corrects his son’s eating habits or messy room when he himself is in a bad mood from work. But for Comenius and the Christian tradition (“Fathers, do not provoke your children to anger, but bring them up in the discipline and instruction of the Lord.” -Ephesians 6:4), “domestic discipline” involves consistency, emotional warmth, and a sensitivity to the child’s needs and abilities. In another counter cultural move (for us anyway), Comenius agrees with Charlotte Mason that children should “be very carefully guarded from bad society, lest they be infected by it” (216). Apparently, the idea that “You are the average of the five people you spend the most time with” has a deeper moral point to it. Comenius also believes that ‘idleness is the devil’s playground’ for the young, who are apt to “be led to evil deeds or contract a tendency to indolence” through it (216). They should therefore “be kept continually employed either with work or with play” (216). 

It is important to note the Christian coloring that Comenius has given discipline in its role in developing prudence, at the same time as we consider the tradition’s questioning of corporal punishment in school. Quintilian, the famous Roman rhetorical teacher, for instance, had ruled against the use of corporal punishment in his Education of an Orator as tending toward a slavish disposition in students and abusiveness on the part of the tutor (I.3.14). Comenius, likewise, seems to have a lighter approach, remarking famously on the natural curiosity of children and the easiness of the way he recommends. However, when it comes to moral and spiritual matters he has a Christian seriousness that we must reckon with. He begins by noting the inevitability of discipline: “Since it is impossible for us to be so watchful that nothing evil can find an entrance, stern discipline is necessary to keep evil tendencies in check” (216). 

The whole work of sowing the seeds of prudence is for Comenius elevated to the spiritual plane of reference, when we view it from a Christian worldview–a fact that increases the need for watchfulness and careful treatment of moral maladies through timely discipline:

For our enemy Satan is on the watch not only while we sleep, but also while we wake, and as we sow good seed into the minds of our pupils he contrives to plant his own weeds there as well, and sometimes a corrupt nature brings forth weeds of its own accord, so that these evil dispositions must be kept in check by force. We must therefore strive against them by means of discipline, that is to say, by using blame or punishment, words or blows, as the occasion demands. This punishment should always be administered on the spot, that the vice may be choked as soon as it shows itself, or may be, as far as is possible, torn up by the roots. Discipline, therefore, should ever be watchful, not with the view of enforcing application to study (for learning is always attractive to the mind, if it be treated by the right method), but to ensure cleanly morals. (216-217)

Comenius’ measured approach stands between the extreme positions of our time and his, where the sterner forms of punishment (and even the name of punishment) is either neglected or over-used. His little phrase, “as the occasion demands,” endorses the prudential use of varied types of rebuke or consequence in a way that fits the students’ moral misstep.

If we are to recover the Aristotelian goal of prudence, we must reconsider the details of discipline as a part of a moral education. Principles and practice, examples and discipline form the appropriate web of “good instruction” that functions as a preliminary training in prudence, with the ultimate goal that students internalize right and wrong and a true sense of the value of things in the moral and spiritual universe from a God’s-eye perspective.

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It’s been some time since I’ve written explicitly on narration for Educational Renaissance. The last article that addressed it directly (Narration as Flow) came shortly after launching the popular eBook “How to Implement Narration in the Classical Classroom” that I recently retired because of incorporating it into a larger book. (Don’t worry! I replaced it with a similar resource “Charlotte Mason and the Trivium: Planning Lessons with Narration”.) But that doesn’t mean the teaching tool of narration has been off my mind since. 

Narration on My Mind

Last winter I did most of the leg work in terms of research and writing to get my book A Classical Guide to Narration (forthcoming with the CiRCE Institute) into the right place for the editorial process. Lugging that stack of books home for nights and weekends, I plugged away while watching the kids as my wife taught voice lessons. I didn’t know I could write while monitoring a toddler and a baby… but after all necessity is the mother of invention. Then during the discussions last spring that led me to take a new position as Principal at Coram Deo Academy, narration was my one non-negotiable. If I came, Coram Deo would be implementing narration.

Over the summer I had the opportunity to share about narration at several conferences: the Association of Classical Christian Schools, the Society for Classical Learning, the University Model Schools International, the CiRCE Institute, and the Charlotte Mason Family Camp. Lastly, as the school year got started, I trained my own faculty in the practice of narration, as well as the Ecclesial Schools Initiative by Zoom. I even had the opportunity to share narration with Asian Christian educators as part of a team-taught virtual course on poetic knowledge led by Ravi Jain. That all might sound exhausting, but for me it was exhilarating, not least because of the chance to share about a practice that really matters to me and is life-changing for children.

All this is to say that narration has been on my mind quite a lot as I’ve first researched then rehearsed material from the book in presentations. One of the most interesting and significant discoveries that I made in my research about narration is its history before Charlotte Mason in the grammatical and rhetorical tradition. Since my first hints at this fact years ago while reading John Locke and Quintilian, I’ve been fascinated by earlier educators’ endorsement of practices very like Mason’s narration. 

But I think this history is especially significant for two movements today: the Charlotte Mason movement and the classical Christian education movement. You can see why. If narration has a history in the liberal arts tradition, then it makes it hard for either Masonites or CCE leaders to claim that never the twain shall meet. 

Charlotte Mason vs. Classical Christian Education?

For instance, Art Middlekauff of Charlotte Mason Poetry has claimed that Charlotte Mason did not “look to the classical tradition to guide her theory” but instead “looked to the Gospels, science and her observations of children.” While containing a grain of truth, this claim ends up being a simplistic reduction of Mason. It would be more accurate to say that Mason regularly makes rhetorical appeal to advancing science (as a good Victorian British Christian might be expected to). But by science, it’s also worth wondering whether this is necessarily against the classical tradition. After all, science itself is a term and sphere dependent on the tradition of the liberal arts and sciences. 

Also, Art Middlekauff has picked his evidence with care and neglected Charlotte Mason’s own references to classical philosophers of education as authoritative, as well as her refutation of new educational thinkers on the basis of the principles of the liberal arts tradition. While she does claim some newness for her methods—as many classical educators have over the course of the tradition, by the way… the liberal arts tradition has never been opposed to innovation—she is also happy to confess her reliance on tradition. 

As she says explicitly of her educational theory in the first chapter of her final book Towards a Philosophy of Education,

I have attempted to unfold (in various volumes) a system of educational theory which seems to me able to meet any rational demand, even that severest criterion set by Plato; it is able to “run the gauntlet of objections, and is ready to disprove them, not by appeals to opinion, but to absolute truth.” Some of it is new, much of it is old.

(2008 Wilder, 28-29; emphasis added)

This hardly sounds like an extreme modernist who opposes engaging with educational theorists of the past in favor of the new science. The very fact that she quotes from Plato belies such an assumption. Moreover, the implication of her wording is that more of her theory is old than it is new (“some” is less than “much”).

Opposing Charlotte Mason and the classical tradition in this way also presents us with a false dichotomy that is unfortunately present in the thinking of both some Masonites and some classical Christian educators: either we must look to the past or we look to modern research and methods. In an educational landscape obsessed with scientism, it is no wonder that the classical education movement has taken a hard turn toward historical theories and methods. Mason had much less pushing her to such an extreme, and, in fact, with the tide just beginning to ebb out toward the new depths of scientific discovery about the brain, psychology and the nature of habit formation, she had to make an appeal that garnered the attention of a very different crowd. 

Given the differences of time and place, the fact that Mason’s rhetoric differs from the modern classical education movement is not at all surprising. But this should not confine Masonites and classical Christian educators to separate camps and antagonism, especially given the amount of essential agreement between them. Besides, the opposition of Charlotte Mason and the classical tradition makes little sense; they are such different things! Unless we think of the classical tradition as some monolithic, unified theory and practice of education, opposing a single thinker to it is a strange notion. We could just as easily set up Plato, or Aristotle, Quintilian, Augustine, Aquinas, Luther, Melanchton, Bacon, Locke or Comenius to it. There is always a gap between any individual educational thinker and the tradition as a whole (if one can even view it that way); otherwise, they would be mere parrots. Sometimes this gap represents a departure from a core value, but other times it represents a fruitful development from within. Such a question cannot be solved by simplistic dichotomies.

More important perhaps is the gap between movements that should be allies. Educational Renaissance exists, in a way, to bridge this gap, not only between Charlotte Mason and the classical tradition, but between new and old educational theory in general… between the insights of ancient wisdom and the legitimate advances of modern research. The real glory is in an appropriate synthesis of seemingly opposite ideas and data, as no less revered a figure than Thomas Aquinas revealed in his own dialectical method. 

Charlotte Mason’s Claim of Discovery

Narration is a test case of this broader claim for Charlotte Mason and the classical tradition. While some will still want to emphasize the disagreement and opposition, narration tells a different story. And that is because narration is a teaching practice that Charlotte Mason adapted from the rhetorical tradition. 

But if this is the case, as I contend in my forthcoming book, then what of Charlotte Mason’s own claims about discovering narration? I know very well that she nowhere cites any explicit classical sources for the practice, like John Locke (her likely source based on similarities in language and detail in Home Education) or his source Quintilian. On the other hand, she does confess in her final volume that she “was reading a good deal of philosophy and ‘Education’ at the time.” And she does cite Plato’s conception of the forms or ideas for support of the mind needing proper sustenance (see Towards a Philosophy of Education, Introduction, Wilder: 18). This is one of many instances that at least puts the lie to the claim that she doesn’t draw her philosophy from the tradition; in fact, whether or not she draws from it as a source for her theory, she often feels the need to justify it in the philosophical terms of the classical tradition. 

But of course, she does also mention her observation of children and general reading, as stepping stones on her journey of discovery:

It is difficult to explain how I came to a solution of a puzzling problem,—how to secure attention. Much observation of children, various incidents from one’s general reading, the recollection of my own childhood and the consideration of my present habits of mind brought me to the recognition of certain laws of the mind, by working in accordance with which the steady attention of children of any age and any class in society is insured, week-in, week out,—attention, not affected by distracting circumstances. (20)

While this may seem like a claim that she derived the details of narration from observation and her own philosophical reflection, instead we should see it as an account of how she came to the principles that undergird the practice of narration. (I’m reading Karen Glass’ In Vital Harmony now and am definitely enjoying it.) For Charlotte Mason the practice of narration had to have a number of attendant circumstances for it to work optimally: a rich text, a single reading, a moral impulse in the students, etc. The practice of narration becomes a valuable and global tool of learning when embodied in the right atmosphere, as a means of training in the habit of attention, and through the natural curiosity of the mind feeding on living ideas. 

Narration itself is a common and simple enough exercise that it was used here or there, in rhetorical training, as far back as we have record. It was the principles of the child’s personhood and the nature of mind that she claimed to have discovered and applied more uniformly to the how, when and what of narration. As she remarks later in the introduction to her final volume,

The reader will say with truth,—”I knew all this before and have always acted more or less on these principles”; and I can only point to the unusual results we obtain through adhering not ‘more or less,’ but strictly to the principles and practices I have indicated. (24)

This account from Charlotte Mason herself seems to answer the charge that she claimed to have “discovered” narration, and so it cannot be derived from the classical tradition. 

As we’ll see in the next article, there are a variety of earlier sources that detail the regular use of narration in a manner very like what Charlotte Mason recommended. There are even two of her contemporaries across the Atlantic, rhetoric professors in America, who recommend narration-like exercises in their rhetoric and composition textbook for use in secondary schools. 

Of course, none of these earlier examples call for exactly what Charlotte Mason recommends, but in a way that would have been impossible. Only at Charlotte Mason’s time in England were a wealth of books finally cheap enough and widely available enough for the sort of book-based education she envisioned. The mass publication and commercialization of books in Victorian England was, arguably, a necessary ingredient in the history of narration entering its final stage with Charlotte Mason’s ‘liberal education for all’ movement. 

But more on that next time after we walk through the various stages in the history of narration, as best as I have been able to piece them together so far.

Later articles in this series:

Part 2: Classical Roots

Part 3: Narration’s Rebirth

Part 4: Charlotte Mason’s Practice of Narration in Historical Perspective

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