My assumption is that most followers of Educational Renaissance work within K-12 schools, but I suspect there are some who like me also teach in undergraduate or postgraduate settings either as adjunct faculty or full professors. My hope is that there will be a growing number of college and seminary professors who take seriously the craft of teaching and the concern to provide students the optimal learning environments. I offer this paper for your consideration that perhaps Miss Mason will help you transform your lecture hall into a place where students engage rich texts, assimilate through narration and plumb the depths of great ideas through discussion.

Introduction

The problem facing higher education today is not a crisis of information, or even knowledge, but a crisis of thinking well. Our culture has a glut of information readily available at any number of URLs. The passivity with which we access these things has led to a passivity of the mind; minds disengaged from the living ideas which transcend mere knowledge or information and which alone can give sustenance to the human organ best suited to face the complexities of our modern life.

My musings on today’s educational crisis, particularly as it relates to academic biblical studies, has benefitted greatly from reconsidering a model of education from an unlikely source. Charlotte Mason taught, led an educational reform movement, and produced six volumes on educational philosophy around the turn of the twentieth century. How can this educational philosophy address the concerns we have today as educators within the guild of biblical studies? This paper will explore her philosophy with a view to relating it to the biblical studies classroom. Her method of instruction offers exciting possibilities for utilizing the rich texts available to us—both ancient and modern—within our field and for drawing students into a mind-to-mind encounter with texts in such a way that students may grow in their capacity to think great thoughts.

Charlotte Mason

Charlotte Mason was born in 1842 an only child in Bangor, Wales. Her philosophy of education was prompted by her experiences teaching in Worthing, England and later at the Bishop Otter College in Chichester. Beginning around age 40 and spanning over three decades, Mason wrote six volumes dedicated to expounding her philosophy of education. These volumes capture her struggle to find an educational philosophy that transcends the class barriers that divided Victorian England. The surprising results of her method were seen in the successes of youth from mining communities, previously regarded as hopeless bastions of the uneducated working class. Her final volume, Towards a Philosophy of Education, published in 1923—the year she passed away—shows her development of thought as the Great War shattered the assumptions about culture and society that reigned in the 19^th century.

During her lifetime, a movement of educational reform grew up around her teachings. The Parents’ National Educational Union (PNEU) was formed in 1886 to advance Mason’s philosophy of education among parents who were dissatisfied with the state of education in England. A number of Union schools were opened which carried out her philosophy. Shortly thereafter, a periodical was issued called Parents’ Review—a title reflecting the basis of her philosophy in the role of parents. This journal drew upon a wide array of voices who were working through various aspects of Mason’s philosophy and its practical implications. In 1892, a college dedicated to training teachers was opened in Ambleside, England. The school remains to this day a part of the University of Cumbria.

Three Elements of Mason’s Educational Philosophy

From the writings of Charlotte Mason—a person who devoted her life not just to teaching but to thinking about teaching—several worthy principles may be distilled. Mason understood education to comprise three tools. First, education consists of an atmosphere. This has to do not only with the physical appearance of the setting in which study is to occur, but also to the intangible quality of the space where students are enthused to learn. Teachers are to think intentionally about how the room is arranged, what is in the room, and what is not; all with the goal of creating an atmosphere conducive to learning. The most significant aspect, especially for those of us who have little control over the look and feel of the rooms to which we are assigned, is the atmosphere we establish through our presence and what we say as educators.

Second, education consists in the disciplined training of students in order to attend to the tasks not simply of academic enterprise but of a life devoted to personal growth. Some college students come to us with well-formed academic habits, but it is largely the case that students these days simply do not know how to accomplish simple tasks, such as memorizing Greek vocabulary, writing multi-paragraph essays with clearly articulated topic sentences, or even scheduling their reading load appropriately. We could add to these basic operational skills intellectual habits such as courage or humility. If we as educators don’t take responsibility for these shortfalls, then the higher-order projects we might have them do will not rise to the level we could otherwise expect from them. So, in my teaching, I actually spend time talking about the habits students need to have to succeed in university and these need to be reviewed consistently.

Finally, Charlotte Mason proposed that education consists in living ideas. If we are presented with “mere dry summaries of facts,” our minds will at some point flush these out of the system. Instead, if we are presented with living ideas from great literature, our minds are challenged to think along the same paths as the text, causing them to grow in maturity and sophistication. It is this point that has revolutionized my own teaching methodology, and I will spend the rest of my paper spelling out the method Charlotte Mason has formed for accessing these living ideas.

The Approach to Accessing Ideas in the Text

Mason articulated a five-part methodology that has been the foundation of my own educational praxis, although I cannot claim to have achieved mastery of it yet. First, one must provide students with “a well-chosen book”. For biblical studies, we have available to us not only the books of the canon, but literature from the Ancient Near East, the pseudepigraphical literature, the writings of early Judaism, the early church and even Greco-Roman materials. Furthermore, we are not limited to texts from the ancient world. A well-written book by a recent author can be an excellent guide to great ideas.

Second, the teacher should provide a brief talk before each lesson. This amounts to a lecture in our parlance. But, it is a lecture that is far more pared down than what I used to prepare. My goal now is to set up the student’s reading in such a way that they are introduced to primary issues that will give them success in reading the assigned lesson. In this brief lecture, I can feel free to bring up any number of complex issues. But I need to do so as a means to giving tools to the students. I’m thinking here of models of interpretation, historical background, social setting, exegetical conundrums, the composition history of a text, the outline of a book. My shift in thinking, though, has been to shift my work away from being the primary conveyer of content and toward enabling students to do the primary work of learning through direct contact with texts.

Third, students read their lesson. We literally read texts out loud in the classroom. I usually select passages from their out-of-class readings. I call on individual names, and there are a few who struggle with their reading diction. My goal is to have students encounter the ancient text as much as possible. Therefore, the focus of our class time is on texts. I find that, although this is a simple activity, the students attend closely to the reading and I get far fewer eyes glazed over, even in my three-hour evening class.

Fourth, students narrate or re-tell what was read. This is the most important step of the method. This is where students are able to assimilate their readings into their own knowledge. They are forced to think along with the text. Mason responds to the criticism that this is mere memorization by explaining, “in the act of narrating every power of [the] mind comes into play, that points and bearings which he had not observed are brought out; that the whole is visualized and brought into relief in an extraordinary way; in fact, that scene or argument has become a part of his personal experience; he knows, he has assimilated what he has read. This is not memory work. In order to memorize, we repeat over and over a passage or a series of points or names with the aid of such clues as we can invent.” She goes on to identify the role of memory work within the broader scope of education. But memorization is not assimilation. This component of Mason’s educational philosophy, I find, has been the tool that opens up for students a world of thought previously untapped.

Finally, the fifth part of the method is a concluding talk. Most often, this is a discussion about the text or reading. I facilitate this by asking leading questions, but more times than not, there is a student-to-student conversation that grows out of points they are noticing in the text. Sometimes I need to instruct students in the course of this discussion or, rarely, in place of the discussion. For instance, if we have read a text that is central to a model of interpretation, I might need to talk briefly about the background of, say, the German school that gave rise to the model of interpretation, critiques of it, and so forth and so on. What I avoid is collapsing the method so that the students become passive. If the ancillary ideas are so important, they might require their own session in which I will identify a text and apply the approach to it.

This is the method, then. It begins with the selection of an excellent text, rich with ideas. A small talk sets up the reading. We read the text (either aloud together or prior to the class). After reading, the students are called upon to re-tell the reading in their own words, supplying details from the text, in the proper order and capturing the language and style of the author. Finally, we talk about the text in a rich way that engages the ideas of the text.

The Method in Practice

I have applied this basic method with success in the coursework I teach at Trinity Christian College in Palos Heights, Illinois. Let me now spell out a couple of ways in which I have incorporated this method into an otherwise standard liberal arts Christian college. (Editor’s note: since writing this, I have also utilized this method at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School in Chicago and Covenant Theological Seminary in St. Louis.)

First, for each class session I prepare a lecture that will run roughly ten to fifteen minutes of a fifty-minute block. If the class time is longer, I still tend not to lecture for more than fifteen minutes since I would rather have the students engaged in the exercise of reading, narrating and discussing. I plan readings that must be done prior to class, just like most other professors do. However, I ask students to tell me in their own words the contents of that reading. This might take about five to ten minutes; maybe longer if the readings generate questions and discussion. I usually choose a passage from scripture that becomes the focus text for our class session. Sometimes I might cue up several scripture passages. I call on students to read aloud. When this is done, I call on other students to re-tell the reading. After this, I ask them, “What strikes you about this passage?” or “What did you notice about the passage?” or “What is this passage communicating?” There are any number of questions that can get students to think through the reading and begin discussing it.

Sometimes, a passage will have difficulties or raise problems in the minds of some students. I will allow this problem to be expressed and fester for a bit. I don’t want to step right in as the answer man. I want them to begin working through why there’s a problem here, what the factors are, what alternative interpretations might be there, etc. There is often a lot of back-and-forth between students as they grapple with these things. When the discussion begins to slacken, I will now go up to the board and ask students to call out the salient items under discussion, which I write down so that we can all visualize the ground we have covered. Only then, after having them work a long way through the matter, will I step in to assist them in bringing some kind of resolution. Sometimes, though, I might be able to leave them in suspense and have them do some light research along with a brief write-up on it. The energy behind the problem discussed in class supplies the energy that will motivate them to get it done.

One time, for example, I used the introductory lecture to teach my students about call narratives and the elements that scholars have discerned as the constituent parts of a call narrative. I had them read the calls of Abraham, Moses, Isaiah, and also the baptism of Jesus. They listed all of the elements of a call narrative for each, discussing ways in which the pattern is evident in each and ways in which certain elements might be absent. Students narrated each passage and each passage had ample discussion. By the end, they knew rather well how to identify a call narrative, what the constituent parts of a call narrative are and even why they matter. They knew all of this not because I told them so, but because they had engaged the text for themselves. They now had assimilated knowledge and learned how to interpret biblical text in a sophisticated and nuanced way.

A second way in which I apply the method is as a means of assessment. For each term, I assign about five written narrations. These are minimal assignments, consisting of 500 words in which the student must read a text and re-tell the contents of the text in their own words. You might be surprised at the effectiveness of this tool. I find that students learn to really pay close attention to what they are reading. They are usually able to get on paper a good amount of details from the text and in the sequence that the text presents them. I am also able to see places where students are not understanding the text or have lost focus on the text. I also use the written narrations as a means to provide feedback on writing mechanics. College students who have never written in the biblical studies discipline still need to attend to proper grammar, spelling, punctuation, sentence structure, verb tenses and organization of paragraphs. It is only after doing several written narrations that I pass them on to doing more substantial written projects involving thesis statements and argumentation.

One of the challenges that written narrations presents to students is to capture the essence of a reading in three categories: details, sequence and vocabulary. I give them feedback on each. I might ask students to re-tell in their own words the story of the exodus. They cannot merely copy the text of the Bible. They must begin selecting elements to write. While selecting, they must arrange them properly. These types of skills are necessary in higher forms of writing where they will be researching many texts (both primary and secondary sources).

Students Who Can Think

Ultimately, the goal of my application of this method is to cultivate students who can think. I found myself more and more frustrated at test scores and student aptitude when using the more traditional method of lecturing. With this method, created by Charlotte Mason, I find that students are scoring as well or better on tests and they are growing in their ability to discuss in mature and sophisticated ways the subject matter surrounding biblical studies.

The minds of students that are brought into contact with texts of high quality are raised to new heights. Their minds are challenged and exercised in ways that create a hunger and thirst for extended mental activity. I still run into the problem of students who want to merely pass the next exam. But I think despite this sentiment, they are also eagerly cultivating practices that will feed their curiosity and maintain an active thought life after they leave my classroom.

From my vantage point as a member of a biblical studies faculty, this afterlife of thought is imperative. The reason for this is that the primary location in which biblical studies resides is outside the academic domain. It is in religious and cultural discourse that most people engage with the Bible and its attendant literature. Only a small number of our students will ever go on to engage with biblical studies as academicians. But students who are trained to think rather than merely acquire (and quickly forget) a set of facts about the Bible will be properly equipped to partake in the wider discourse surrounding the Bible in our culture.

The post What has Ambleside to do with Jerusalem?: A Consideration of Charlotte Mason’s Philosophy of Education as a Model for Teaching Biblical Studies appeared first on .

As we saw, narration has its roots in the classical era with rhetorical teachers like Aelius Theon and Quintilian, where its goals included the development of memory, fluency and style for future orators. It was particularly powerful as a practice because it fused the natural oral story-telling of pre-literate cultures with the refinements of classical Greek and Roman rhetoric. Before moving to the rebirth of narration in the Renaissance and early modern era, I have to admit to an unfortunate gap in my own knowledge. 

I cannot claim to know that narration was absent from medieval pedagogy. In fact, I suspect that it was not. But I have not (as yet) found any direct evidence of it. There are undoubtedly more places to look than I have had the opportunity of doing so to date. So I would encourage any interested readers to keep an eye out and let me know if you find mention of any narration-like practices occurring in the Middle Ages. However, for the purposes of this series I will have to temporarily conclude that, like much of the tradition of classical rhetoric, narration went into dormancy during the Middle Ages. 

After all, the political situation changed drastically after the fall of Rome, and as a result rhetoric training itself underwent a shift. Without democratic political bodies to convince of a particular course of action, ceremonial and legal rhetoric predominated and crystalized into a more literate and scholastic form. As George A. Kennedy, a leading rhetorical scholar, put it: 

“With the end of orderly civic and economic life not only did public support of education disappear, but the reasons for rhetorical education in its traditional form declined. Fewer councils remained in which an orator could speak, and legal procedures were disrupted; on the other hand, barbarian kings easily acquired a taste for being extolled in Latin prose or verse, even if they did not understand what was being said.” (Classical Rhetoric and Its Christian and Secular Tradition, 2nd ed.; Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999; 196)

The golden age of oratory had passed. It was no wonder that grammatical training predominated, followed by the refined logic of scholasticism. And likewise, it is no wonder that, when the tides turned toward the Renaissance and a return ad fontes (“to the sources”), back to the rhetoric of the classical era, that we would see narration reborn as well.

Narration’s Rebirth, Stage 1: Desiderius Erasmus (1466-1536)

I owe to Karen Glass my awareness of the first two stages in narration’s rebirth: Erasmus and Comenius (see Know and Tell: The Art of Narration, p. 16). However, the context of Desiderius Erasmus’ work is enlightening, because it illustrates just how indebted he was to the grammatical and rhetorical tradition. The chapter leading up to his mention of narration reads like a passage out of Quintilian. In fact, Erasmus himself references his dependence on Quintilian, saying,

“As regards the methods of the rudiments—that is, of learning to talk and knowing the alphabet—I can add nothing to what Quintilian has laid down.”

Desiderius Erasmus, Concerning the Aim and Method of Education, translated by William Harrison Woodward (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1904), p. 168

Erasmus affirms the value of teaching students to speak both Latin and Greek as the main sources of all the important knowledge then available. Then he gives instructions for exercises in composition, followed by how the teacher should guide students through reading classic texts. His composition exercises are based on the classical principle of imitation: “The Master in the course of his reading will be careful to note instances which present themselves as models suitable for imitation” (170). He then recommends the more challenging exercises of Quintilian, like “paraphrasing poetry into prose and the reverse process” (171). 

While we judged this exercise of Quintilian’s to be an extension of narration, in which the student would write a paraphrase from memory rather than with constant reference to a text, it is almost certain that this is not the case for Erasmus’ recommendations. One clue comes in his recommendations for translating from Greek into Latin and vice versa in the same section—what Walter Ong might call an art of high literacy and one which almost certainly relies on being able to reference the text itself (see Erasmus, Aim and Method of Education, 171-172).

Given the invention of the printing press before Erasmus’ lifetime, highly increasing availability of texts, we are probably right to assume that the educational situation of Erasmus’ day was quite different from the Roman era. Narration of texts from the teacher’s single reading would have become more counterintuitive because texts were cheaper and more accessible. Why would one narrate merely the text itself when it is there at hand?

We might bemoan this fact as the fulfillment of Plato’s dire predictions in the Phaedrus (see the final section of the previous article). However, the challenging composition exercises that Erasmus proposes would have probably compensated for the loss. And this isn’t even to mention how Erasmus himself transformed narration into a practice for assimilating the teacher’s lecture in a passage that out-flanks Plato’s objection:

“The master must not omit to set as an exercise the reproduction of what he has given to the class. It involves time and trouble to the teacher, I know well, but it is essential. A literal reproduction of the matter taught is, of course, not required, but the substance of it presented in the pupil’s own way. Personally I disapprove of the practice of taking down a lecture just as it is delivered. For this prevents reliance upon memory which should, as time goes on, need less and less of that external aid which note-taking supplies.”

Erasmus, Aim and Method of Education,177-178.

Here we can see narration endorsed as “essential” in the case of the teacher’s lecture, rather than with texts. Of course, we have to remember that Erasmus has already discussed imitative composition exercises on topics taken from the classic texts that the students would read. So it is not as though there would be no opportunity for students to assimilate the subject matter of texts through their own writing.

What may be more surprising is Erasmus’ stance against note-taking during the teacher’s lectures and in favor of narration. His reasoning involves the training of the memory and the reduction of an “external aid” over the course of a student’s education. For Erasmus “note-taking” is a crutch, or better yet, corresponds to the use of training wheels for the memory. They should be taken off as soon as possible. 

Narration, then, in the first stage of its rebirth, has shifted its focus from the text read aloud to the spoken lecture on the text. In a similar fashion, the training of a student’s rhetorical style has been almost entirely subsumed in the training of the memory for content (note “the substance of it presented in the pupil’s own way”), and the narration is most likely a written enterprise, since it causes “time and trouble to the teacher,” most likely because of the extra work involved in reading and assessing the students’ narrations. 

Narration’s Rebirth, Stage 2: John Amos Comenius (1592-1670)

The great Czech educational reformer, philosopher, pastor and theologian, John Amos Comenius, sometimes called the father of modern education, represents the next stage in the history of narration. The opening statement of his stunning work on the philosophy of education Didactica Magna or The Great Didactic promises much in terms that are familiar to advocates of narration:

“Let the main object of this, our Didactic, be as follows : To seek and to find a method of instruction, by which teachers may teach less, but learners may learn more; by which schools may be the scene of less noise, aversion, and useless labour, but of more leisure, enjoyment, and solid progress ; and through which the Christian community may have less darkness, perplexity, and dissension, but on the other hand more light, orderliness, peace, and rest.”

John Amos Comenius, preface to The Great Didactic

Charlotte Mason found in narration an ideal “method” for attaining Comenius’ golden key of education: teachers teaching less and learners learning more. Of course, the extent to which Comenius anticipated Charlotte Mason, or Mason followed Comenius, is an area ripe for more study, at least for me. 

My Head of School Dave Seibel and I are planning to read Comenius’ Great Didactic together starting this January to see what we will make of it. Classical Academic Press also has a short introduction to Comenius in their Giants in the History of Education series, which I plan to purchase and read as well. But I already know from Karen Glass that Comenius recommended that “every pupil should acquire the habit of acting as a teacher. This will happen if, after the teacher has fully demonstrated and expounded something, the pupil himself is immediately required to give a satisfactory demonstration and exposition of the same thing in the same manner” (as qtd in Glass, Know and Tell, 16). Glass quotes from another of Comenius’ works The Analytical Didactic (trans. Vladimir Jelinek; Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1953; 193), in which Comenius “reinterpreted the principle of nature that he had described in The Great Didactic as a principle of logic” (John E. Sadler, “John Amos Comenius” in Encyclopedia Britannica; accessed January, 2021). 

As stated, Comenius’ variant on narration embodies the golden key of his Great Didactic by turning the student into the teacher after a teacher’s “demonstration” or “exposition”. It thus follows Erasmus in focusing on a spoken lecture or explanation by the teacher rather than a text. The new development present in Comenius is to emphasize the ironic transformation of student into teacher. Chris Perrin of Classical Academic Press has referred to this pedagogical idea as the classical principle Docendo Discimus (“By teaching we learn”) in his course Introduction to Classical Education. (I wonder where Perrin himself derived this Latin phrase from…. Was it from Comenius or an earlier thinker in the tradition? Or is it a phrase he himself quipped to represent a traditional conception?) Similarly, I have often referred to the classical principle of self-education, citing Charlotte Mason’s quip that there is no education but self-education and Dorothy Sayers’s remarks about students learning how to learn in “The Lost Tools of Learning”.

I am confident that more remains to be said on Comenius and narration, but I have not as yet been able to procure the rarer work that Karen Glass quoted from (though a used copy is now in my Amazon shopping cart). However, for now we can conclude that in Comenius’ hands narration of the teacher’s lecture became the mechanism for learners learning more and teachers teaching less. The narration most likely occurred orally, given the internal logic of the student becoming the teacher, but we cannot be sure without looking closer at the context.

Narration’s Rebirth, Stage 3: John Locke (1632-1704)

John Locke represents a final and perhaps unconnected stage in narration’s rebirth. To suppose that he did not engage with either his partial contemporary Comenius, or with the famous Erasmus, would probably be going too far. But his early modern Enlightenment philosophy no doubt registered itself in his treatise, Some Thoughts Concerning Education (Hackett, 1996; orig. published 1693). I have already expressed my view elsewhere that he, like Erasmus, was directly dependent on Quintilian (see the author’s A Classical Guide to Narration; CiRCE, 2020; p. 96, n. 122). So his recommendations on the topic are best categorized as a part of narration’s renaissance or rebirth. 

For Locke narration is the solution to a problem with the “classical” education of his day. He begins his section on rhetoric and logic with a defense for speaking so little of them up to this point in his treatise:

“The reason is because of the little advantage young people receive by them. For I have seldom or never observed anyone to get the skill of reasoning well or speaking handsomely by studying those rules which pretend to teach it; and therefore I would have a young gentleman take a view of them in the shortest systems [that] could be found without dwelling long on the contemplation and study of those formalities. Right reasoning is founded on something else than the predicaments and predicables, and does not consist in talking in mode and figure itself.” (140)

In objecting to “rules” rather than practice, Locke continues a theme that he has already established in the book about training young children by habit rather than memorized rules. In A Classical Guide to Narration I pointed out that this error of the “classical” training of Locke’s day amounts to a misunderstanding of the classical distinction between an art and a science: 

“The rhetoric teachers of Locke’s day had been treating the art of rhetoric as if it were a science that could be mastered through acquiring knowledge about the art: various names of figures of speech and rules for types of speeches. But without the facility with with language based in practice and cultivated habits, all of it was useless! (A Classical Guide to Narration, 96)

Of course, this antagonism toward logic and rhetoric might make John Locke seem anti-classical in his philosophy of education. But this would be a misunderstanding. Locke is simply endorsing the renaissance humanist stream of classical education over the encrusted scholasticism of the late medieval era. He was refocusing attention on the great authors of the past (ad fontes) and on imitation of worthy models. As he goes on to say, 

“If you would have your son reason well, let him read Chillingworth [an Oxford scholar and churchman, who was a skillful debater, mathematician and theologian]; and if you would have him speak well, let him be conversant in Tully [Marcus Tullius Cicero, the great Roman orator and statesman] to give him the true idea of eloquence, and let him read those things that are well written in English to perfect his style in the purity of our language.” (140)

Developing the arts of reasoning and eloquence, for Locke, come by reading the right authors to provide ideas and models of proper thought and speech. But it also comes by practice, as he says later:

“They have been taught rhetoric but yet never taught how to express themselves handsomely with their tongues or pens in the language they are always to use: as if the names of the figures that embellished the discourses of those who understood the art of speaking were the very art and skill of speaking well. This, as all other things of practice, is to be learned not by a few, or a great many rules given, but by exercise and application according to good rules, or rather patterns, till habits are got and a facility of doing it well.” (141)

Locke’s point accords well with the modern research on elite performance that Anders Erikson and others have brought to light in delineating the value of deliberate practice (as well as near proxies like purposeful practice) for acquiring high level skill. The arts are complex skills and are best trained through coached practice, not mere comprehension of concepts, however true and inspiring. 

Locke’s narration recommendations remarkably embody the principles of effective practice, including the importance of critical feedback, specific focused efforts on improving one aspect of performance at a time, and systematic development of mental models. The entire passage is worth sharing here:

“Agreeable hereunto, perhaps it might not be amiss to make children, as soon as they are capable of it, often to tell a story of anything they know, and to correct at first the most remarkable fault they are guilty of in their way of putting it together. When that fault is cured, then to show them the next, and so on, till one after another all, at least the gross ones, are mended. When they can tell tales pretty well, then it may be time to make them write them. The Fables of Aesop, the only book almost that I know fit for children, may afford them matter for this exercise of writing English, as well as for reading and translating to enter them in the Latin tongue. When they are got past the faults of grammar and can join in a continued coherent discourse the several parts of a story without bald and unhandsome forms of transition (as is usual) often repeated, he that desires to perfect them yet farther in this, which is the first step to speaking well and needs no invention, may have recourse to Tully and, by putting in practice those rules which that master of eloquence gives in his First Book De Inventione §20, make them know wherein the skill and graces of a handsome narrative, according to the several subjects and designs of it, lie.” (141-142)

Like Quintilian, Locke begins with young children telling stories, though he is content for them to tell “anything they know” at first, as the tutor or parent simply plays the role of coach: correcting one fault at a time, as the child practices telling again and again. Instead of focusing narration on the content to be learned, like Erasmus and Comenius, Locke has brought into sharp relief the skill of story-telling and the fluency of speaking gained thereby. While he does recommend Aesop’s fables, like Quintilian, the shift to written narrations form the main focus, and fixing the student’s “faults of grammar” and “bald and unhandsome forms of transition” is his main concern. 

In essence, Locke has restored narration as the foundation stone of rhetorical training, rather than as a method for learning content in any subject. Narration is, for him, the backbone of an English gentleman’s practical skill in speaking and writing that will equip him for the duties of his life. Daily practice in imitating classic authors and especially in learning to write letters (“The writing of letters has so much to do in all the occurrences of human life that no gentleman can avoid showing himself in this kind of writing.”) form the bedrock requirements for his education (142).

Readers who are familiar with Charlotte Mason’s practice of narration alone may be surprised by some of these different applications of narration. Whether it’s narrating from a teacher’s lecture, or correcting the faults in a student’s narration with a focus on skill rather than content, narration’s rebirth through Erasmus, Comenius and Locke defies the standard assumptions of Charlotte Mason’s practice of it. After all, Charlotte Mason seems to almost exclusively envision students narrating from texts without stylistic corrections but a primary focus on content.

In the next and final article in this series, we’ll compare Charlotte Mason’s pedagogy of narration with its classical roots and its renaissance rebirth. Our aim will be to distill some further conclusions for educators today, both practically in terms of how we should use narration in our 21st century context, but also philosophically in what this all means for the classical Christian education and Charlotte Mason movements today.

Other articles in this series:

Part 1: Charlotte Mason’s Discovery?

Part 2: Classical Roots

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

The post Why the History of Narration Matters, Part 3: Narration’s Rebirth appeared first on .

Knowing what I know about the importance of practice for developing skill, I decided to set my hand to the task of practicing my video lectures. Of course, just developing the material fully for these two courses has filled up the vast majority of my available time. But still, I’ve tried to set myself a training regimen for improving my game in video lecturing. Most of all, it’s been my goal to prepare to give my lectures with only a basic outline and the text of key passages I intend to quote from and interact with.

Only that sort of lecture will allow the type of eye contact and natural development of thought that I think is most appropriate for video. I certainly can’t claim to have mastered the medium, but I’m trying to have an Aristotelian growth-mindset and see this opportunity as a chance to aim for excellence even if I’m not there yet. Perhaps this will serve as an explanation (and perhaps an apology) for sharing with you one of my rehearsal lectures for the course A Classical Guide to Narration which aims to share the insights of my recent book of the same name in a video format. (By the way, if you haven’t yet pre-ordered it with the CiRCE Institute, you still have a chance to get in the first printing.)

So for the EdRen blog today, I’ve decided to share a rehearsal part 1 of Lecture 7 from A Classical Guide to Narration, as a sort of preview or sneak peek of some of the content coming out with ClassicalU in the new year.

If you are interested in going further with this content, you can download the free eBook “Charlotte Mason and the Trivium: Planning Lessons with Narration” on the narration page. Also, if you haven’t yet downloaded our new podcast, episode three is on narration and episode four is about classical education. Just search for Educational Renaissance on your favorite podcast app.

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