Mason’s revival of narration therefore stands as a signpost of her larger project. And it is a project that we find inspiration from here at Educational Renaissance. The renaissance had a healthy respect for and appreciation of the classical past, while at the same time being quite innovative in a number of areas. In a way narration is simply one piece of this broader puzzle: all the pieces will help create a more accurate picture of Charlotte Mason as an educator within the liberal arts tradition of education.

In this article we come to Charlotte Mason herself to see how her recommendations for narration square with those of the classical and renaissance educators we have surveyed. We will see that Mason’s use of narration was at least as innovative as any other educator in its history, even if the steps she took make perfect sense as natural developments. In the process we will discern some new possibilities for narration, including how we could revive the narration practices of earlier educators to supplement Charlotte Mason’s recommendations, or even reach out into new and uncharted territory with narration to attain new pedagogical goals. 

We will begin by looking at three issues raised by Charlotte Mason’s practice of narration: 1) the focus on rich texts, 2) the main goal of knowing content, and 3) the methods of narration.

Charlotte Mason’s Practice of Narration, Issue 1: Focusing on Rich Texts

Readers who are familiar with Charlotte Mason will be aware of some of the ways that Mason’s narration differs from that of the educators we have surveyed so far.

The first and most obvious difference, perhaps, is that the focus of Mason’s narration is upon a rich text, and not an informative lecture, as in Erasmus or Comenius, or else the telling of any story that the child knows, as in John Locke. In this way Mason sides with Aelius Theon, Quintilian and the secondary steps detailed by Locke. 

Charlotte Mason has a very practical and down-to-earth set of considerations for her decided preference for what she calls “living books” over “oral teaching” (not to mention the “dry-as-dust” textbooks of her era). Her thoughts in her third volume School Education are worth reproducing in full:

“Reason for Oral Teaching.––Intelligent teachers are well aware of the dry-as-dust character of school books, so they fall back upon the ‘oral’ lesson, one of whose qualities must be that it is not bookish. Living ideas can be derived only from living minds, and so it occasionally happens that a vital spark is flashed from teacher to pupil. But this occurs only when the subject is one to which the teacher has given original thought. In most cases the oral lesson, or the more advanced lecture, consists of information got up by the teacher from various books, and imparted in language, a little pedantic, or a little commonplace, or a little reading-made-easy in style. At the best, the teacher is not likely to have vital interest in, and, consequently, original thought upon, a wide range of subjects.

“Limitations of Teachers.––We wish to place before the child open doors to many avenues of instruction and delight, in each one of which he should find quickening thoughts. We cannot expect a school to be manned by a dozen master-minds, and even if it were, and the scholar were taught by each in turn, it would be much to his disadvantage. What he wants of his teacher is moral and mental discipline, sympathy and direction; and it is better, on the whole, that the training of the pupil should be undertaken by one wise teacher than that he should be passed from hand to hand for this subject and that.”

Charlotte Mason, School Education, vol 3 pg 170

For Mason an inspirational lecture requires a master-mind, in a way the type of teacher that Erasmus called for in his work on education, who could interpret to his students the best of a whole host of great classical works of literature on all topics. But in Mason’s day and age, the master-mind teacher approach would require experts on a variety of subjects, like science and literature, history and math, art and Bible—a feat that was becoming less and less attainable as scholarship proliferated in the modern era. At the same time schooling was spreading to more and more children of the British empire, making this ideal less and less viable, or even desirable for teachers specifically. Teachers were no longer scholars. Specialization had virtually ruled that out. 

And for Mason the practice of narrating from rich texts allows the teacher to focus more, not less, on the “moral and mental discipline, sympathy and direction” that students really need. As she says at the end of her 1st chapter on “self-education” in her final volume Toward a Philosophy of Education:

“In urging a method of self-education for children in lieu of the vicarious education which prevails, I should like to dwell on the enormous relief to teachers, a self-sacrificing and greatly overburdened class; the difference is just that between driving a horse that is light and a horse that is heavy in hand; the former covers the ground of his own gay will and the driver goes merrily. The teacher who allows his scholars the freedom of the city of books is at liberty to be their guide, philosopher and friend; and is no longer the mere instrument of forcible intellectual feeding.” (vol 6 pg 32)

Narration focuses on living books or rich texts as a means of providing the most vibrant and vital source of thought, while relieving the average teacher of the burden of inspiration. She can be a philosopher-guide even in territory she has not mastered to the point of being able to speak on it with power and conviction. 

Exceptions to Focusing on Rich Texts Only

There is an exception clause to Charlotte Mason’s nixing of oral teaching, and that is foreign languages. In her 6th volume Toward a Philosophy of Education, Mason reports on a development in foreign language instruction at her House of Education (the training school for future teachers and governesses) and the Parents Union School at Fairfield where they were apprentice-teachers:

“The French mistress gives, let us suppose, a lecture in history or literature lasting, say, for half an hour. At the end the students will narrate the substance of the lecture with few omissions and few errors.” (vol. 6, p. 212)

It should be noted that this occurred with the senior students, and was a less frequent exercise than narrating from a text. Early training in French, German, Italian or Latin consisted of narrating from texts after they had been translated or “thoroughly studied in grammar, syntax and style” (vol. 6. p. 213). 

I would be remiss if I didn’t mention Mason’s concession to the value of oral teaching. As she herself admitted:

“We cannot do without the oral lesson—to introduce, to illustrate, to amplify, to sum up. My stipulation is that oral lessons should be like visits of angels, and that the child who has to walk through life, and has to find his intellectual food in books or go without, shall not be first taught to go upon crutches.” (Parents Review, Vol. 14, 1903, “Manifesto Discussion with Charlotte Mason”, pp. 907-913)

We have to wonder if Mason’s concerns would have been quite the same, if podcasts had been available in her day… or equally, if books had not been so cheap and readily available. Mason seems to base her advice to focus on narrating from books upon the practical realities of lifelong learning that were available in her day. Books would be the chief source of intellectual nourishment for her students, and so they should learn to walk on their own two feet in reading books from the start. 

Charlotte Mason’s Practice of Narration, Issue 2: The Main Goal of Using Narration

The second area in which Charlotte Mason’s practice of narration differs from the other educators of the classical era or renaissance is in the main pedagogical goal. For Quintilian, Aelius Theon and John Locke the main goal had been rhetorical training: the development of style through imitation. Students were learning, through narrating texts or stories, to speak fluently and to the point, with concise and clear expression. They might very well remember many of the exact details of things they narrated, and certainly stocking the memory with words, phrases, ideas, and common topics was necessary. But the point of all that memory-stocking and practice was the students’ own rhetorical style and fluency. 

As you’ll recall, this changed with Erasmus and Comenius in the renaissance. Now the focus was on the content of the teacher’s lecture or explanation. And they even made a point of emphasizing that the substance of the things, rather than the style of the teacher’s expression, was the important thing to be narrated in the child’s own way. For them, the main goal of narration is the students’ knowledge or memory of content, a scientific rather than rhetorical pedagogy, if you will. Students were learning, through narrating their teacher’s lecture or explanation, certain truths either as background to a text or as pictures of the way the world works. The emphasis is entirely upon narration as a sealing up of new knowledge, and not upon the development of style. 

Well, Charlotte Mason made an innovative leap. Familiar with John Locke’s narration from texts to develop style and fluency in speech and writing, and perhaps also with Comenius (given her quotations from him), she fuses the approach of the two to focus narration upon rich texts, with the main goal of memory of content or the development of knowledge. If you take a moment to glance at the table I have made below, “Narration in Historical Perspective Table,” you can see that she has pulled from the left and top right sections down into the bottom right.

Now here we must note one or two exceptions that seem to indicate that Charlotte Mason had rhetorical training in mind, even if she preferred for various reasons not to emphasize it as the main goal of narration. For instance, when discussing composition of the youngest students (Form I) in her 6th volume, she mentions the style of students’ narrations, as well as the accuracy of the content, saying, “The facts are sure to be accurate and the expression surprisingly vigorous, striking and unhesitating” (vol. 6, p. 190). However, she is still adamant against Locke’s method of coaching students to correct their narrations, whether written or oral, in the younger years: 

“Corrections must not be made during the act of narration, nor must any interruption be allowed.” (vol. 6, p. 191)

“Children must not be teased or instructed about the use of stops or capital letters. These things too come by nature to the child who reads, and the teacher’s instructions are apt to issue in the use of a pepper box for commas.” (vol. 6, p. 191)

“But let me again say there must be no attempt to teach composition.” (vol. 6, p. 192)

Even for the oldest students (Forms V and VI), Mason’s emphasis is against too much active focus on matters of style and rhetoric, preferring a natural imitative process that comes passively through a focus on content:

“Forms V and VI. In these Forms some definite teaching in the art of composition is advisable, but not too much, lest the young scholars be saddled with a stilted style which may encumber them for life. Perhaps the method of a University tutor is the best that can be adopted; that is, a point or two might be taken up in a given composition and suggestions or corrections made with little talk. Having been brought up so far upon stylists the pupils are almost certain to have formed a good style; because they have been thrown into the society of many great minds, they will not make a servile copy of any one but will shape an individual style out of the wealth of material they possess; and because they have matter in abundance and of the best they will not write mere verbiage.” (vol. 6, pp. 193-194)

In essence, Mason’s approach to the development of style was as an afterthought that will take care of itself by narrating rich texts if the teacher doesn’t get in the way. This approach will fall short of what many modern classical Christian educators desire, who value the revitalization of active teaching of the art of rhetoric as a major goal of the movement. We might situate Charlotte Mason in this conversation by imagining the dangers of a “stilted style” or overly programmatic formalist structure, that might result from certain types of prescriptive rhetorical training. The long, natural process of narration that Mason envisioned might, in and of itself, subvert the dangers of formalism in our students’ writing and speaking, even if our schools do engage in somewhat more active coaching in grammar, punctuation, style and rhetorical forms than she envisioned. 

Charlotte Mason’s Practice of Narration, Issue 3: The Method of Narration

We leave to the last the method of narration, whether oral or written. As we saw, classical educators often emphasized one or the other, or else both in sequence. Aelius Theon seemed to envision older pupils, trained in writing previously, coming into his rhetorical school ready to write their narrations immediately. Quintilian, and John Locke after him, envisioned a process that started earlier with oral narration, moving to written narration and composition exercises as students grew in facility with the skill of putting pen to paper. From reading in between the lines of their comments, Erasmus seemed to envision written narrations to be turned in to the teacher, while Comenius implied students becoming teachers explaining truths aloud to the rest of the class after the teacher had first done so. 

Charlotte Mason provides the fullest vision for narration as a consistent pedagogical practice, where both oral and written narration play a consistent role in students’ education. Students gently progress to writing their own narrations as they are able. Examinations at the end of the term utilize written “narration” of any amount of knowledge previously stored in students’ memories by initial narration. Given how central narration became in Charlotte Mason’s schools, it is not surprising to find her and her schools after her innovating other creative ways to narrate through the fine and performing arts. Karen Glass quotes from an article in the Parents’ Review long after Mason’s death about the practice of artistic narrations:

“But is narration…always merely ‘telling back’? It must be, we know, the child’s answer to ‘What comes next?’ It can be acted, with good speaking parts and plenty of criticism from actors and onlookers; nothing may be added or left out. Map drawing can be an excellent narration, or, maybe, clay modelling will supply the means to answer that question, or paper and poster paints, or chalks, even a paper model with scissors and paste pot. Always, however, there should be talk as well, the answer expressed in words; that is, the picture painted, the clay model, etc., will be described and fully described, because, with few exceptions, only words are really satisfying.” (Know and Tell, pp. 46, 48)

It may be a matter of debate how much these dramatic and artistic forms of “narration” began during Charlotte Mason’s lifetime, and to what extent they would fall under her definition of narration. Interestingly, Helen Wix, the author of this article, emphasizes the need for words. Acted narrations require words necessarily and are attested nearer Miss Mason’s time (see the second block quote on Know and Tell, p. 48 from The Parents’ Review of 1924, the year after Mason’s death). We also know that illustrations of particular moments from a literature or history book were a common practice in PNEU schools that Mason supported. So I have included drawn and acted narrations as innovations of Charlotte Mason. But it seems clear that oral and written narration were always the core and regular daily methods of narration, while other artistic “narrations” featured as occasional experiences that kept things fresh. 

The Practice of Narration for Charlotte Mason and Classical Christian Educators Today

What can we learn from this history of narration to guide our practices today? I will conclude this series with a list of propositions and suggestions for the future of narration in our movements today. These twelve points summarize what we’ve learned and point forward to exciting possibilities for using narration as classical Christian and Charlotte Mason educators.

1. Narration began in the rhetorical tradition with the main goal of developing students’ style in rhetorical training.
2. Renaissance educators shifted the focus of narration from books to lectures and the goal of narration from style to knowledge of content. 
3. Charlotte Mason adapted narration from the tradition for her context in accordance with her philosophy of education and mind. 
4. Her innovations in narration included taking the focus on rich texts from the classical era and joining it with the main goal of knowledge of content from the Renaissance educators. 
5. She also elevated it to the core status of the primary teaching and learning tool of the PNEU, a development that has support from modern research on retrieval practice.
6. Therefore, classical Christian educators who adopt narration may want to revive some of the rhetorical training pedagogy from John Locke, Quintilian and Aelius Theon.
7. Educators who follow Charlotte Mason may also want to consider more carefully her concerns about training in style or composition and whether or not the concerns she had about creating a “stilted style” were responding to specific trends in composition or rhetoric instruction during her day. 
8. Perhaps some Masonites will opt for more explicit rhetorical training than she might have envisioned, even while avoiding the errors she was warning against.
9. Given the technological developments of our modern world in audio and video recording and the free accessibility of high quality material from “living” voices and scholars, both Masonites and classical Christian educators might want to expand the role of inspirational lectures and oral teaching in education, with narration as the learning tool for either content or style. 
10. Classical Christian educators may feel that many of their teachers (or video instructors) reach the level of “master-minds” (in Charlotte Mason’s terms) and therefore inspirational lectures should play a larger role in their schools, or online courses. 
11. If the power of the spoken word is gaining new prominence through video recording and sharing technologies, then perhaps the next important innovation in narration would be to employ video recordings of great modern orators for students to narrate with the goal of developing their own rhetorical style, while also learning content.
12. At the same time, the use of lectures/speeches as a focus of narration should not crowd out the central importance of rich texts (either for Charlotte Mason or the classical tradition). In our day and age, a facility with the thoughts of the best minds of earlier eras has never been more crucial for students’ development of moral wisdom and historical judgment. 

Hope you have enjoyed this series! Share your thoughts in the comments on why you think the history of narration matters.

Earlier articles in this series:

Part 1: Charlotte Mason’s Discovery?

Part 2: Classical Roots

Part 3: Narration’s Rebirth

The post Why the History of Narration Matters, Part 4: Charlotte Mason’s Practice of Narration in Historical Perspective appeared first on .

For someone like me, having spent my entire professional career straddling the aisle between the two (at a Charlotte Mason influenced classical Christian school), this can be easy to say. But the fact that narration — the centerpiece of Mason’s method, and her claim to fame, as it were — was not itself discovered by her, but was a mainstay of the classical tradition may come as a shock to some. As I explained last time, Mason did claim to have discovered how to use narration as a global tool of learning in such a way as to train students in the habit of attention and significantly improve their rate of learning and retention. But the devil is in the details. 

In this article I want to unpack some of those details, as a sort of preview of my new book A Classical Guide to Narration coming out with the CiRCE Institute in November. (I found out this week you can preorder on Amazon and at a discount on the CiRCE website. Also, have you seen the endorsements from Ravi Jain, Jessica Hooten Wilson, W. Davies Owens, and Bill St Cyr in the CiRCE press release?) The history of narration matters because it helps classical educators approach narration (and Charlotte Mason) with greater confidence. Once Mason is in the Great Conversation about education, classical educators will gain other helpful insights and correctives as well. Narration’s history also matters because it helps Masonites understand her application of narration in a fuller light. When they know the history, they can be better equipped for the task of continuing Mason’s legacy by bringing a liberal education to all children of the modern world in a way that is philosophically sound and holds old and new in concert from a Christian worldview.

Now to the history!

Narration as a Progymnasmata in the Rhetorical and Grammatical Tradition

In my own story of discovery, John Locke and Quintilian were the first to the party. In reading Locke’s Some Thoughts Concerning Education I was struck by the similarity of thought with Charlotte Mason on numerous topics: the importance of attention, the role of the instructor, the futility of rules and the necessity of training in habit. But then I chanced across his discussion of Rhetoric and was amazed at his recommendations for the use of narration. Sometime afterward I discovered many of the same themes and topics in the opening books of Quintilian’s Institutes of Oratory, as well as a stunning similarity in the suggestions for narration, like using Aesop’s fables. At this point I knew I had struck upon something significant. 

Classical Roots Stage 1: Narration in Aelius Theon

But I still thought there might have been a simple and unique route along the narration highway: from Quintilian, to Locke, to Mason. It was only later that I realized narration’s roots went far deeper. For this I needed the expertise of a scholar of rhetoric: George A. Kennedy, the long time Professor of Classics at the University of North Carolina. In his masterful book Classical Rhetoric and its Christian and Secular Tradition from Ancient to Modern Times (2nd ed.; University of North Carolina, 1999), he writes:

“The earliest surviving treatment of progymnasmata is the work of Aelius Theon, a teacher in Alexandria in the middle of the first century after Christ. In Theon’s method of teaching a passage was read aloud and students were first required to listen and try to write it out from memory; after gaining skill in doing this they were given a short passage and asked to paraphrase it and to develop and amplify it, or seek to refute it.” (26-27) 

Here we have the first distinct step in the history of narration. The first surviving book of preliminary exercises for rhetoric students (a progymnasmata) records Theon’s “method of teaching.” And it is surprisingly book-based in a way that is reminiscent of Mason: a passage is read aloud, students are required to listen, and then write out a narration from memory.

This is clearly not dictation, where scribes in training would write as the text was read out slowly and with pauses, aiming for word-for-word accuracy. Instead, this “method of teaching” focuses on students’ ability to listen with focused attention, inwardly digest and reproduce content in writing as faithfully as possible.

For Aelius Theon, this practice no doubt honed students ability to hear and understand a complex discourse. This then became the foundation on which students could practice amplifying the thought or refuting it accurately. From what we know of the value of retrieval practice from modern research, it also likely gave his students a ready wit and a memory stocked with the style and vocabulary and living thought of the authors read to them. 

Classical Roots Stage 2: Narration in Quintilian

It is not surprising that we have to wait for Quintilian to hear of narration again. Many of the rhetorical handbooks deal more with the customs and details of judicial speeches that were most popular or effective in the classical era, and not so much with the pedagogy of how students were actually trained. Quintilian’s On the Education of an Orator, however, is the fullest ancient source of pedagogy we have, beginning from students’ very cradles with a call for the hired nurse to speak only the best grammatically correct Latin. 

Quintilian’s treatment of narration is assigned to the important work of the grammaticus, the elementary school teacher who would be responsible for training a student in written and oral expression, and beginning his study of authors (from poets to historians and astronomers). Among other things the grammaticus needed to prepare the future orator with the foundational skills and fluency necessary for elite rhetorical training:

“Let boys learn, then, to relate orally the fables of Aesop, which follow next after the nurse’s stories, in plain language, not rising at all above mediocrity, and afterwards to express the same simplicity in writing. Let them learn, too, to take to pieces the verses of the poets and then to express them in different words, and afterwards to represent them, somewhat boldly, in a paraphrase, in which it is allowable to abbreviate or embellish certain parts, provided that the sense of the poet be preserved. He who shall successfully perform this exercise, which is difficult even for accomplished professors, will be able to learn anything.”

Quintilian, Institutes of Oratory 1.9.2-3 (trans. John Selby Watson, ed. Curtis Dozier and Lee Honeycutt; Creative Commons, 2015) 49-50

Notice how, for Quintilian, we have a step added before Aelius Theon’s practice of written narration. After all, students can speak before they can write, so why can’t their narration training start earlier, when they’re just advancing from the “nurse’s stories” to their formal education. Here Aesop’s fables become the hallowed starting place for narration — a pattern we see in Locke and Mason as well. As anyone knows who has read them, Aesop’s fables are a great place to begin narration with young children partly because of their length. They are short but pack a punch. Get the children telling the fables read to them “in plain language,” not as an exercise in ornate style, but in elegant simplicity of plot and compact expression. Then as they develop their writing skills, they can do the same practice as written narration, with the emphasis placed upon simple, correct statement of fact, rather than stereotyped formulae. 

Narrating Poetry?

Of course, once narration of stories is in place, poetry provides the next challenge. We have to read a bit between the lines to imagine what exactly Quintilian is implying. Do each of the students have their own copy of the poems read? Or is the teacher still reading aloud to the students? If the former, then students might be able to look at the poem while they “take to pieces” and re-express “in different words” the verses. This would be a very different analytical task from narration, but a powerful rhetorical training practice in its own right. Benjamin Franklin employed a similar tactic in teaching himself to write essays. If the latter, then we have another example of narration being used as the foundation stone for rhetorical training, with students hearing a poem and then reproducing it in prose, paraphrasing it, amplifying parts and diminishing others. Of course, the fact that the form of the content is being deliberately changed has added an extra element of artistry to it, but presumably it is still long form telling, as opposed to the short, look-up-the-sentence-in-the-book answers of the exercises in our modern curricula. 

My instinct tells me that the second option involving narration is the more likely for Quintilian’s ancient context. Scrolls were not cheap and it is hard to see the average grammaticus of the Roman era providing his students with textbooks or copies of each poem. He did not have a teacher’s lounge with a copier to retreat to and quickly scan the poem he found in his old college textbook. Of course, students would likely have transcribed poems and memorized them by heart as well, so we could imagine a student first transcribing a poem and then proceeding with this exercise; however, students normally wrote on a wax tablet with a stylus, and while these could have multiple “pages,” it seems less likely that ancient teachers would tolerate this kind of lack of verbal memory. 

Lastly, we can appreciate the value of Quintilian’s concluding statement: “He who shall successfully perform this exercise, which is difficult even for accomplished professors, will be able to learn anything.” Not only does this seem to clinch the argument in favor of the latter (Is picking apart poetic lines that are right in front of you really that hard?), it prevents us from claiming that narration was an ancillary or insignificant thing in Quintilian’s pedagogy. Yes, it’s true that he doesn’t spend a lot of time discussing it, while he’s happy to wax eloquent on issues of Latin grammar and solecisms. But if it mattered little, why would he make so stunning a claim for it as a touchstone of all learning? Here we have a foretaste of Mason’s notion of narration as the centerpiece of education. 

Have you downloaded the free resource “Charlotte Mason and the Trivium: Planning Lessons with Narration”?

The Seed of Narration’s Classical Roots: Hearing-Dominance and Preliterate Narration

As modern people in a text-dominant society we tend to undervalue the power of human memory for extended discourse, as we have largely abandoned this ability in our reliance on texts. The reality is that the cost of paper and writing rendered the ancient and medieval world largely hearing dominant, even after the introduction of writing. “Hearing dominant” is a term I borrow from John Walton and Brent Sandy’s The Lost World of Scripture (IVP Academic: 2013), but the ideas of orality and literacy go back to my undergraduate reading of Walter Ong’s mind-blowing book (Orality and Literacy, Methuen: 1982). Hearing dominance means that people remembered and relied more on what they heard in day to day communal life than on the scripted communication of a text. We forget that until the modern era the vast majority of people were not literate, but relied on professionals for that sort of thing. 

Hearing dominance also means that oral narration of things heard was just a common occurrence. It almost didn’t need to be said, as it was so obvious a feature of social interaction with others. If you think about it, the only ways that content could have been passed down in a preliterate society would have been through narration or memorization. Whether a story or a wisdom saying, any tradition would have been passed down through tellings and retellings. Corrections would have occurred during family recitals, but only recognized authorities would likely have shared at public events. Oral narration would have simply been a part of culture and an aspect of normal social life before writing came along. And it makes sense that after the introduction of writing among an educated elite, the centrality of spoken and heard discourse would not immediately vanish.

These considerations seem to me to support the prominence of narration-like activities not only in the classical world, but in the pre-literate antiquity out of which the classical world was born. We might call preliterate narration the seed out of which the classical roots of narration sprung. After all, once texts became more and more prominent in education, narration was bound to be used as a technique to get the matter on the page into the pupils’ heads. It would have seemed natural. That’s not to underrate Aelius Theon’s or Quintilian’s pedagogical brilliance. It’s simply to see it in its broader context.

As we have become more and more text dominant we have moved further and further from the discipline of expecting one another (or our students) to hear and know enough to tell. Ironically this is exactly what Plato’s Socrates foretold in the dialogue Phaedrus. He retells a myth of an Egyptian Pharaoh Thamus being presented with the invention of great arts by the god Thoth. When Thoth praises writing as a “branch of learning that will make the people of Egypt wiser and improve their memories,” king Thamus counters,

“If men learn this, it will implant forgetfulness in their souls; they will cease to exercise memory because they rely on that which is written, calling things to remembrance no longer from within themselves, but by means of external marks. What you have discovered is a recipe not for memory, but for reminder. And it is no wisdom that you offer your disciples, but only its semblance, for by telling them of many things without teaching them you will make them seem to know much, while for the most part they know nothing, and as men filled, not with wisdom, but with the conceit of wisdom, they will be a burden to their fellows.” (Phaedrus 274e-275b, from The Collected Dialogues, Princeton: 1989; 520)

The problem of writing causing forgetfulness is akin to the problem of securing attention that Charlotte Mason puzzled over in our last article. In fact, we might even say it is the same problem. How can we prevent ourselves from relying on the written record for reminders rather than performing the spontaneous, yet difficult “act of knowing”? The answer lies in a task like narration that forces the student to immediately retrieve from memory. It was inevitable that rhetorical teachers would find a solution to this intriguing problem, given that one of their main tasks included training future orators in the art of memory!

In our next installment we will explore the rebirth of narration in the Renaissance with recommendations of Erasmus and Comenius, and John Locke’s critique of “classical” training during the Enlightenment.

Other articles in this series:

Part 1: Charlotte Mason’s Discovery?

Part 3: Narration’s Rebirth

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

The post Why the History of Narration Matters, Part 2: Classical Roots appeared first on .