If a person desires to cultivate their ability to sing or paint beautifully, they rarely do so by reading a book or attending lectures. Instead, they attach themselves to a teacher or coach, who has attained sufficient mastery of the skills to arrange a series of exercises for them, a practice regimen, and to give them regular feedback on their progress. This, in essence, is the pedagogy of apprenticeship that we will discuss more in this article. 

Avoiding the Totalizing Effect of Modernism on the Arts

But before we do, let’s remember that there are many different types of craftsmanship or artistry that have been developed by human beings throughout time. Arts may have an originator, as Jabal was the original keeper of livestock, Jubal the player on the lyre and pipe, or Tubal-cain bronze- and ironworking (see Gen 4:20-22), but they also have traditions that grow and change with new circumstances. The arts are not interchangeable, whether among each other or between different cultural circumstances. If one is trained in navigation, that hardly makes a person a qualified practitioner of medicine. A painter is not equipped to design buildings, nor a business owner to make furniture. In the same way, an ancient sailor cannot operate a nuclear submarine. The traditions of various arts are affected by the tools and technologies, the goals and circumstances of their application. Arts are not one size-fits all.

Perhaps these considerations are enough to counter the totalizing instinct of the modern era, which is well illustrated by Bloom’s Taxonomy. By abstracting six orders of educational objectives in the cognitive domain, Bloom and his colleagues assumed that the main thing in education was transferable intellectual skills. But a proper recognition of the arts (at least) as situated in time and place would help us to understand that a substantial amount of what we are seeking to pass on to our children consists in particular skills and abilities that were invented at a particular time and are judged to be of continuing relevance to life in the world.

Now I know very well that what I am saying now may sound like modern educational pragmatism, but allow me to counter this concern. When applied to the liberal ‘arts’, the traditional nature of the arts is another way of arguing for the Western tradition of grammar, logic and rhetoric; mathematics, science and music. These ‘disciplines’ were discovered in time and place, and mastery of them involves us necessarily in the tradition that each one birthed. So this supposed pragmatism or subjectivity ends up grounding us in the historical realities and the objectivity of an enlightened and practical tradition. It is modernism’s abstractions and pretensions to god-like knowledge that have left us moorless on a sea of preferential postmodernism, grasping about for anything that might be considered “useful”.

When applied to the arts in general, this recognition of the arts’ traditional nature led me to propose a fivefold division of the arts as a help to classical Christian educators. 

Techne — Artistry or craftsmanship

1. Athletics, games and sports
2. Common and domestic arts
3. Professions and trades
4. Fine and performing arts
5. The liberal arts of language and number

While I argued for the inclusion of athletics, games and sports as well as the professions and trades, I sympathize with Chris Hall, Kevin Clark and Ravi Jain’s three-fold division of common, liberal and fine arts. Perhaps it is simply because I like fives rather than threes… but in all seriousness, this division represents a judgment call on the best way to indicate to educators the proper types of artistry or craftsmanship that they should aim at in their various programs. 

Perhaps it goes without saying that no educational institution can train its students in every possible area of artistry. And if, as I have said, mastery in particular arts does not transfer to others, then every educational institution must engage in some level of discernment as they plot the curricular sequence and develop offerings in extracurriculars. Those schools that aim, to a lesser or greater extent, at the Christian, classical ideal of a university (from the Latin ‘universitas’ meaning ‘totality’ or ‘wholeness’; see Cardinal Newman’s The Idea of a University) will want to develop some level of mastery in each of these five directions, alongside the other intellectual virtues. But the particulars will of course be culturally situated, as are the arts themselves. (This does not, I might add, argue against the revival of an ancient art that has been lost, which may from time to time be absolutely crucial.) We must make these decisions boldly in our cities and communities with an awareness of the context and the availability of masters in the crafts to apprentice our young students.

Toward a General Pedagogy of Apprenticeship

In addition to avoiding the totalizing instinct in our artistic divisions, we must also avoid the temptation to think of training in the arts as essentially the same in each area. It is absolutely a different thing to train a student in geometric proofs, than it is to train him as a soccer goalie. According to Aristotle’s definitions, both are intellectual virtues that are rightly called ‘artistry’, but that does not mean they are the same or that the training should look similar. However, types of ‘artistry’ are sufficiently similar in some core essentials, such that Aristotle and the tradition have rightly distinguished them from the other intellectual virtues. So, while it doesn’t look the same to coach a student to excellence in singing or painting, I can call both these activities ‘coaching’ and certain types of teaching activities immediately come to mind as being more appropriate than others. Training activities in different types of artistry have more in common with one another, than they do with cultivating practical wisdom, scientific knowledge, intuition or philosophic wisdom. 

The key point is that while each art is distinct, the intellectual virtues themselves are taught in fundamentally different ways, because of their radically different nature. So we can generalize some aspects of proper training in an art in a way that will help us develop a pedagogy of apprenticeship. Far from contributing to the problem of treating everything alike, developing a pedagogy for each intellectual virtue will contribute greatly toward our ability to make proper distinctions between different types of teaching as educators. 

Happily I am not the first person to follow the Aristotelian tradition by seeking to develop a pedagogy of techne, Aristotle’s intellectual virtue of ‘artistry’ or ‘craftsmanship’. The great Christian Reformation era educator John Amos Comenius developed a pedagogy of art in his Great Didactic, articulating many similar points to what I have addressed in attempting to revive the classical distinction between an art and a science. His recommendations also accord well with what we know of the value of deliberate and purposeful practice from modern research on elite performance, which I have discussed at some length before (as has Patrick Egan in this article). 

What Artistry Requires

Comenius begins his discussion of a pedagogy for art by identifying the core requirements of artistry or craftsmanship. As he says,

Art primarily requires three things: (1) A model or a conception, that is to say, an external form which the artist may examine and then try to imitate. (2) The material on which the new form is to be impressed. (3) The instruments by the aid of which the work is accomplished. (194)

The “model or conception” may look very different in the different arts: a model of a house you want to build is different than a map of where you want to sail or the imaginary ark of a penalty kick in soccer. But all arts require this mental image or plan upon which the artist operates. Art cannot be an accident, for then it would not be art, but chance in Aristotelian terminology. In the same way, the materials worked may be vastly different, from the wood, metal and straw used in building to the words, phrases and arguments used in logic and rhetoric. Finally, instruments are necessary for craftsmanship, from a voice box for singing to the gardener’s gloves and the astronomer’s telescope. 

While it may seem obvious to point out these different artistic requirements, they are of immense help to a pedagogy of craft. How often do art students work on projects without a clear model or conception to imitate? We can forget to help beginners learn the basic principles of handling tools and materials correctly, particularly in cases where the tools and materials are less obvious, like the meanings of words, grammar and syntax in the case of the language arts. This draws attention to the fact that these requirements point in the direction of three other things that are prerequisites of artistry:

But when the instruments, the materials, and the model have been provided, three more things are necessary before we can learn an art: (1) a proper use of the materials; (2) skilled guidance; (3) frequent practice. That is to say, the pupil should be taught when and how to use his materials; he should be given assistance when using them that he may not make mistakes, or that he may be corrected if he do; and he should not leave off making mistakes and being corrected until he can work correctly and quickly. (194)

Comenius’s comments illustrate the idea that one of the main problems in the teaching of arts comes from rushing the early stages of development. The teacher or coach too often assumes that the novice knows how to use the materials or will not make any more mistakes after being corrected once or twice. The training of the hands (whether literal or figurative) must be slower and more methodical than that. Bad habits can easily be acquired through insufficient attention to the basics.

We can also note positively that it is not without significance that cognitive psychologists have developed the terminology of ‘mental models’ for a student’s absorption of these models or conceptions into his intellect in order to perform some artistic activity. The writers of Make It Stick define a “mental model” as a “mental representation of some external reality”, noting that they are extending its use to “motor skills, referring to what are sometimes called motor schemas” (6; n.1 on 257). They go on to illustrate their definition through the example of artistry in a sport like baseball:

Think of a baseball batter waiting for a pitch. He has less than an instant to decipher whether it’s a curveball, a changeup, or something else. How does he do it? There are a few subtle signals that help: the way the pitcher winds up, the way he throws, the spin of the ball’s seams. A great batter winnows out all the extraneous perceptual distractions, seeing only these variations in pitches, and through practice he forms distinct mental models based on a different set of cues for each kind of pitch. (6-7)

We can notice from this example that a person does not necessarily need to be able to articulate a mental model in words to have it. In fact, in this case if the player’s conscious mind were to get involve trying to categorize and analyze the cues, the ball would have already flung past the plate. Often an artist’s mental models are like these motor skills, hard-wired in as almost an instinctual, bodily response. These models or conceptions are formed by “frequent practice” with the immediate feedback of whether he was right in his swing or wrong. It must be reality that the artist is modeling in his mind as he works with his materials according to the natural constraints of the art itself.

The Canons of Artistry

After establishing the requirements for artistry, Comenius lays out eleven canons for a pedagogy of artistry in his Great Didactic. Later in life he summarized this method of the arts more succinctly in his Analytical Didactic:

This method requires theory, prudence, and practice. Theory is necessary, so that a man, no matter what he does, will not do it like a brute, on blind impulse, but with an understanding of what he is doing. Such understanding inevitably brings with it caution and vigilance not to err in his work, and constant practice finally makes him incapable of error. (155)

The term “theory” explains the precepts and rules of his earlier discussion, and accords with Aristotle’s requirement that ‘art’ be according to reason. “Prudence” seems to draw attention to the artist’s sifting process, showing “caution” and “vigilance” to not make errors, but to act in such a way as to bring about the desired outcome. “Constant practice” completes the learning process by making him “incapable of error,” a state that we might call mastery. 

One of the main dangers, in Comenius’ mind, is that educators might overemphasize theories and precepts at the wrong stage of an artist’s development. As he notes in his first canon, “What has to be done must be learned by practice” (Great Didactic 194):

Artisans do not detain their apprentices with theories, but set them to do practical work at an early stage; thus they learn to forge by forging, to carve by carving, to paint by painting, and to dance by dancing. In schools, therefore, let the students learn to write by writing, to talk by talking, to sing by singing, and to reason by reasoning. In this way schools will become workshops humming with work, and students whose efforts prove successful will experience the truth of the proverb: ‘We give form to ourselves and to our materials at the same time.’ (195)

We can see that Comenius lends his support to the classical understanding of the liberal arts as forms of verbal craftsmanship. When we linger over the theories and rules, without giving our beginning students practice in talking, writing, singing and reasoning, we are breaking the cardinal rule of training in artistry. Comenius’ vision of schools as “workshops humming with work” sets an inspiring standard for us to judge our teaching by. It well accords with Dorothy Sayers’ interpretation of the trivium as the lost tools of learning. The upshot of her clarion call in the 1940s was that we were too focused on teaching ‘subjects’ rather that giving our students the opportunity to handle the materials of knowledge through productive and (we might add) artistic activities. 

Comenius thinks that the formation of students’ mental models for this practice should occur, not primarily through precepts or rules, abstract theories, but instead through examples (195). He cites Quintilian for classical support of his method: “It is many years since Quintilian said: ‘Through precepts the way is long and difficult, while through examples it is short and practicable.’ But alas, how little heed the ordinary schools pay to this advice” (195).

Comenius continues to look to the mechanical or common arts for fruitful analogies of how to best train students in grammar or logic:

The very beginners in grammar are so overwhelmed by precepts, rules, exceptions to the rules, and exceptions to the exceptions, that for the most part they do not know what they are doing, and are quite stupefied before they begin to understand anything. Mechanics do not begin by drumming rules into their apprentices. They take them into the workshop and bid them look at the work that has been produced, and then, when they wish to imitate this (for man is an imitative animal), they place tools in their hands and show them how they should be held and used. Then, if they make mistakes, they give them advice and correct them, often more by example than by mere words, and, as the facts show, the novices easily succeed in their imitation. (195-196)

Comenius’ description of the apprenticeship model of “mechanics” lays out a few key steps: 

1. Students are given a general acquaintance with the works produced, the end-products of the art.
2. Students respond with a natural desire to imitate through producing works of their own.
3. The master provides the students with the proper tools and models their use, showing them examples of the techniques.
4. The master corrects the students through both examples and advice, sharing the theories and precepts while correcting students.

This last point, the proper use of theory and precepts at the end rather than the beginning is detailed in his eleventh canon, where Comenius is focused on the swift correction of errors during practice:

(ix.) Errors must be corrected by the master on the spot; but precepts, that is to say the rules, and the exceptions to the rules, must be given at the same time.

Hitherto, we have urged that the arts be taught rather by example than by precept: we now add that precepts and rules must be given as well, that they may guide the operations and prevent error. That is to say, the less obvious points of the model should be clearly explained, and it should be made evident how the operation should begin, what it should aim at, and how that aim can be realised. Reasons should also be given for each rule. In this way a thorough knowledge of the art, and confidence and exactness in imitating will be attained. (200)

Comenius’ description of mistake-focused practice coheres well with what Daniel Coyle calls “deep practice” in his book The Talent Code. Practice must be purposeful or deliberate, to the extent possible, and take advantage of all the resources, in terms of rules and precepts developed by the masters in that tradition of artistry. The correction of errors and constant practice, based on examples and informed by theory, constitute the core essentials of the apprenticeship model of teaching an art. 

In the next article we’ll develop this pedagogy of artistry further by laying out an apprenticeship lesson structure to guide teachers of the arts, as we draw further insights from Comenius and modern research.

Earlier Articles in this series:

1. Bloom’s Taxonomy and the Purpose of Education

2. Bloom’s Taxonomy and the Importance of Objectives: 3 Blessings of Bloom’s

3. Breaking Down the Bad of Bloom’s: The False Objectivity of Education as a Modern Social Science

4. When Bloom’s Gets Ugly: Cutting the Heart Out of Education

5. What Bloom’s Left Out: A Comparison with Aristotle’s Intellectual Virtues

6. Aristotle’s Virtue Theory and a Christian Purpose of Education

7. Moral Virtue and the Intellectual Virtue of Artistry or Craftsmanship

8. Practicing in the Dark or the Day: Well-worn Paths or Bushwalking, Artistry and Moral Virtue Continued

9. Apprenticeship in the Arts, Part 1: Traditions and Divisions

Later articles in this series:

11. Apprenticeship in the Arts, Part 3: Crafting Lessons in Artistry

12. Apprenticeship in the Arts, Part 4: Artistry, the Academy and the Working World

13. Apprenticeship in the Arts, Part 5: Structuring the Academy for Christian Artistry

14. Apprenticeship in the Arts, Part 6: The Transcendence and Limitations of Artistry

The post Apprenticeship in the Arts, Part 2: A Pedagogy of Craft appeared first on .

(See Jason’s article on CSI “7 Steps to Narrating the Bible”!)

In biblical studies we seek to cultivate the habits of reverence, humility, submission to the text, and other qualities of faithful scholarship. But I propose another goal should rise to the top: enjoyment. The enjoyment that students have in reading a novel, or an eerie poem, or an adventure epic. 

When students are engaging with the Bible, we should hear laughter and gasps. We should see quizzical eyebrows and wide-eyed shock. I love to see students jumping out of their seats to be picked to identify a ‘hidden’ motif of Joshua. To see awkward blushes and grins, in unfolding the romance of Ruth and Boaz. To see shock and dismay over the violence of Genesis. And I had to laugh at my student’s obvious frustration, annotating her way through the book of Judges, with its noted cycle of idolatry: “Oh no… This is so wrong… Oh why? … That was cruel… This is just sad… Be smart and think!… Not again!”

My students read through the entire biblical canon in community, and their literary enjoyment of it is a memory that will last. Whether visually depicting the imagery of a Psalm or orally narrating the downward spiral of Genesis, students will remember Scripture as profound, holy, and artistically compelling. St. Augustine quipped, 

“Perhaps someone inquires whether the authors whose divinely-inspired writings constitute the canon, which carries with it a most wholesome authority, are to be considered wise only, or eloquent as well. A question which to me… is very easily settled. For where I understand these writers, it seems to me not only that nothing can be wiser, but also that nothing can be more eloquent.” 

 On Christian Doctrine, section 9

Why have we often missed the literary beauty of the Scriptures? Why do we move so quickly to “personal application,” while failing to linger in the episodes and the larger, sweeping narrative? Many a theologian has noted that we throw out good reading skills when it comes to the Bible—cutting the text into bite-size daily chunks, reading without context in mind, failing to find the author’s key themes and motifs. 

We have our modernity to blame. Theologian Peter Leithart depicts the Enlightenment and subsequent theological disputes as having moved evangelicals toward only half of the equation: unfolding the literal meaning and the moral application. But in Rehabilitating the Quadriga, Leithart explains that modern readers have missed out on the riches of Scripture by overlooking the medieval fourfold approach. We have ignored allegorical (or typological) reading and anagogical (or forward-looking reading, in light of final things). He urges us to recover more ancient ways of reading Scripture. 

Many modern advocates of theological interpretation of scripture are seeking to revive the more ancient, literary and typological approach to Scripture, and the good news is that we can implement this in K-12 Bible classes, even without personal training in the field. We can apply best-practices from teaching other literature as we study the canon. Here are 5 practical tactics to cultivate an enjoyment of scripture through a literary approach:

1. Annotating a Reader Bible 

This methodology revolves around close-reading and annotating of the text, so it is crucial that students have their own copy of a simple pew Bible or reader Bible to serve as their consumable textbook. Most reader Bibles are published in 4-6 volumes to complete the canon, and they are available in most translations. Students will build a personal library of the whole biblical canon. The embossed hardcover on these reader Bibles simply say “Pentateuch” or “Poetry,” but inside, the Bible looks like a novel or set of poems. 

Students are taught to treat this book as the valuable resource it is—to mark it, underline, and annotate neatly in pencil. A black-and-white composition book completes the required resources. Students will add quotes to this commonplace book over the six years that they read through the canon. It is a solid setup for a literary approach: a hardcover “novel” plus a growing journal of quotations. 

2. Seeking Simplicity: Multum non Multa

In keeping with the classical principle of “much, not many things,” we should cultivate long-term focus on a text rather than jumping between many resources. Students can sustain attention through a whole book or whole canonical section.  

To strip away distractions, students are asked to read with a pencil on the text, annotating their way through a full book. But there are two ways to practice sustained attention: 

1) Close reading of dense chapters, full of meaning. (Read at least twice.) Or

2) Longer periods of reading through several chapters in one sitting. 

“Long form reading teaches the students to follow a plot, poem, or letter from start to finish,” noted Zach. “It also sharpens the students’ attention span by requiring them to work and remain focused. Long form reading isn’t done every class period, because we take time to dive-deep at key moments, but either way, students should interact with the text first-hand prior to the teachers dispensing information.”

It is best to read in a good translation, to follow-along on a hard-copy as a skilled reader reads relatively swiftly, and then stop and do a close reading at key moments. Since they wouldn’t stop after every paragraph of the Iliad (because it’s lengthy), they keep up a similar pace with much of the Bible’s historical narratives. Otherwise, it can be hard to finish! 

Both reading methods seem . . . basic. Does this reduce the role of the teacher or eliminate direct instruction? By no means. But it does mean that the teacher’s role switches from lecture to hands-on coaching in skills. “Students benefit from habits and routines,” Zach explained. “Learning to read Scripture is like apprenticeship. The teacher is the lead learner and should model habits that the students will acquire over time, after much repetition. Good biblical reading should be seen as training.” 

3. Embracing Literary Skills 

Students at Veritas Christian Academy (the school where I teach Pentateuch and OT historical books) quickly learn that they will utilize literary skills daily in Bible class. There is no way to follow a complex text without using tools of genre, structure, precise vocabulary and synonyms. 

Precise attention to language is also how biblical theologians do their work. Many insights found by scholars are missed by average readers only because one’s literary understanding has to be increased to see the connections. Bible study tools that have been discussed for decades (“Listen for repetition”) only work when students understand the range of synonyms for a given word. 

4. Connecting with Ancient History

Since the canon is a collection of texts written in ancient Hebrew and Greek, we need to spend more time entering into the world of ancient history. Zach notes,

“Those who authored the biblical text had many similarities to us, but they also saw the world differently and we should learn from their worldview. It requires the reader to take on an ancient imagination.”

But discussing ancient history doesn’t have to be a dry, scholarly affair. In fact, since Veritas’ reader Bibles don’t contain scholarly footnotes or commentary, students have to use class discussion to work out their existing knowledge of ancient cultures and enter into “what this probably meant.” 

And don’t underestimate how much ancient knowledge is gained simply through broad reading of the Old Testament. The importance of land, agriculture, fertility, offspring, local gods, and differing gender-social roles is evident directly in Genesis.

Unleash your students’ creativity in wondering what life was like before the modern era! How did the ancients pass on writing, produce needed goods, utilize power, or reason about natural and supernatural forces? Even a bit of ancient background and ancient imagination goes a long way. 

5. Unleashing a Hunt for Imagery

Recurring words and images create through-lines across the Bible. Teach students to listen for repeated ideas, even if they don’t use the exact same word, and even if they seem like a minor concrete detail. These details will add up to a richer, more beautiful story when we keep track of them. But because motifs lie under the surface, we have to act like detectives. Have you heard repetition and wondered, “Is this a whole-Bible motif?” Check a scholarly work like the Dictionary of Biblical Imagery. Then do some thinking: What would this image mean to ancient people? Where did we see this motif earlier? Does it run all the way from Genesis to Revelation?

“We can be a lead learner, training students as apprentices,” Zach encourages. “Equip them with skills they need to be those with ‘eyes to see’ and ‘ears to hear’ God’s words, and then let them experience their own journey. My students often see aspects of the biblical text that I haven’t even noticed. I appreciate how we get to journey toward truth together.” 

A literary approach to the Bible lays a rich feast of manifold, complex meaning. What better could we spread before our students? Yes, they will have the choice as they grow, whether to go on believing. But I don’t think people want to walk away from a feast of meaning that is so very rich. When you start to see everything in existence illuminated by the light of Christianity, with all these layers of meaning—every concrete thing having a deeper, poetic, symbolic meaning. That is very hard to walk away from. It would constitute a loss to move from sacred, poetic living into non-meaning. Bare atoms. Nothingness. The richer the theology, the more lasting the faith. The imagery of the Bible can fuel new imagination for a kingdom way of living.

The post Enjoying the Bible as Literature: 5 Strategies for Engaging Students in Reading the Canon 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 .