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

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1) The Primacy of the Audience

2) Perspective is Power

3) Multiple Styles

In teaching an art form, we can tend to focus on the technical aspects of the art, but we also need to take a long-term view of the role an art form will take in the person’s life. How will the art form enable a person to create meaning and purpose in life? How will the person use the art form to connect to others? These kinds of questions cannot wait until after students have learned to form complete sentences, paragraphs and essays. It should already be integrated into writing instruction from the time a student enters the abstract reasoning (formal operational) stage of development.

The Primacy of the Audience 

First, students should be taught to think about their audience. Most students write for an audience of one: their teacher. But the teacher is the worst possible audience to write for. The student that writes for a teacher is thinking predominantly about the grade a teacher might give. Now a teacher has to read what the student is writing. That’s what a teacher is paid to do. But in the real world you don’t want to have to pay others to read your writing, you want to get paid when others read your writing. Sure, this sounds a bit crass, but it’s the reality of professional writing. 

A quick aside. What do I mean by professional writing? We can all picture journalists and novelists as the epitome of professional writers. But what I mean is anyone for whom writing is essential to the accomplishment of their job. Lawyers, for instance, must spend a significant amount of time writing professionally. Office managers, musicians, museum curators, police officers, legislators, advertisers all have to write in some capacity. Their ability to excel in their profession often comes down to their ability to write effectively within their field. And writing effectively means serving the widest possible audience within that field. I am writing predominantly to teachers through this blog. Think about all the writing tasks your job entails: lesson plans, classroom newsletters, report card comments, lecture notes, emails, etc. Effective writing in this field requires thinking through who your audience is. The next time you write, say, a classroom newsletter, would it impact your style if you thought to yourself, “I want to write in such a way that these parents want to share this with their friends.” What if you create a culture where the parents can’t wait for your next newsletter? Okay, enough with the aside. Back to the students. 

Students should be taught to write for somebody who will be interested in what they have to say. Students should be writing, so that the person who reads this (basically you as the teacher) can picture and advocate for their potential audience. My feedback as a teacher incorporates a sense of effectiveness in getting noticed by an audience. I could give comments like, “You really grabbed my attention with that illustration.” Or “Consider moving this idea into the introduction to draw your audience in.”

My thinking on writing as communicating with an audience was crystallized by the excellent work being done at the University of Chicago. There is an excellent YouTube video by Larry McEnerny. At the time of recording he was director of the Writing Program at the University of Chicago. I don’t know how many other universities are teaching writing in such a forward-thinking manner—my guess is not many. The premise McEnerny is working with is that students in his class will largely be in academic and professional fields. However, his advice is pertinent for creative fields as well.

Too often colleges and universities teach an orthopraxis of writing to fit students into the mold of accepted procedures for student writing in college courses. What better way to kill inspiration, creativity and motivation? This trickles down to secondary education as well. We teach writing with a view to the conventions of the college classroom. It is well and good to be prepared for college, don’t get me wrong. However, students should have already cultivated a love for writing for an audience before leaving for college, so that they can glean the most from their college education for the benefit of those they will serve as writers. There’s no switch that gets flipped at graduation that makes students stop being classroom writers and start being writers attracting an audience. They need to learn all along the way to be writing for an audience. For fear of losing my own faithful audience, I will end my diatribe there.

One final thought before moving on. Recently several prominent voices have offered advice for those seeking to build an audience. (I’m thinking predominantly of Seth Godin, Simon Sinek and Tim Ferriss, although I’m sure there are others who would lay claim to giving this advice as well.) The idea is that seeking to build an audience is the best way to alienate an audience. Instead, writing for an audience of one—namely yourself—is the best way to build an authentic audience. I think this has serious implications for teaching writing to students. We need to be careful to help them find their own voice and to promote their own interests as writers.

(Again, I need to carefully define what I mean: to find one’s own voice actually means to ingest many ideas from others—the great books—and to imitate the work of others. This is NOT some free-association exercise where a student discovers some special source within.)

Our ultimate aim is to promote the audience of one ideal, which means that the teacher/grader cannot be the audience of one. Students should learn how to create the pieces they desire to see exist in the world. What thesis, poem, novel, film script, sports analysis do they want to enact for no other benefit than their own interest? It is exactly this kind of impulse that attracts an audience.

Perspective is Power

Second, students should be taught to write about their perspective. They should learn how to write a thesis. They need to give an opinion, to share their perspective. If they can’t share their perspective, then all they’re doing is giving information. In this day and age information is cheap; it’s everywhere. The internet is glutted with an infinite amount of basically free information.  What people really want and need is perspective. If our students can learn how to convey their perspective, then they will be creating something of value for their audience.

I recently had a student who was struggling to create a thesis statement. He couldn’t articulate his perspective. So what I told him to do is practice in an area of interest. He likes to watch soccer. So I told him to start a blog (“You don’t even need to publish the blog…”). Analyze the game and give a perspective as to why your team won or lost. Then support your perspective by marshalling evidence such as how effective the team’s formation was, what players were on the field, were bad fouls committed or did the referee manage the game poorly.

Notice how highly transferable these skills are. This student can now apply these skills to an analysis of literature, a review of recent legislation, or the impact of events on a historical era. The student has learned to provide something of value to his audience: perspective.

Let me be clear about what this entails. Obviously to share a perspective, an author must work with information. One must differentiate the best information from the chaff that the wind drives away. One must plumb the depths of what the information means. One must connect one piece with another, especially finding links that perhaps others haven’t seen or given enough consideration to. One must bring to bear upon the information the accumulated background knowledge, even while humbly admitting a sheer lack of knowledge in the face of the infinite information out there. Yet, the work of writing is not just to repackage information, it is to bring perspective to the information.

Multiple Styles 

Third, students need to learn how to write in multiple styles. What do we mean by multiple styles? Too often we try to teach only an academic style. The academic style is great for particular kinds of writing, but it’s very limited in accomplishing the first and second ideas I mentioned. It is not a great style for attracting the widest possible audience, and it is not always the best style for conveying perspective. It can be great for conveying perspective if what you’re trying to do is present a very detailed argument in an academic setting.

Now don’t get me wrong, academic writing has to be part of any writing curriculum. Students should learn how to write judicial and deliberative essays. This is a style that demands precision and logical skill. However students should also be encouraged to explore different kinds of style—narrative styles, poetic styles—so that they can expand their sense of how to communicate ideas. I also want to add that there is no dichotomy between academic and other styles. Really effective academic prose incorporates narrative and poetic elements.

Learning about different styles and stylistic choices contributes to the first two points. To attract an audience and to provide perspective, students should be exposed to and practice different styles. Teachers should have students read different styles, analyze their attributes, and then imitate those styles, so that they can gain power in what they have to say. A great way to do this is through assigning a written narration or more complex imitation responses, like modernizing a work.

When I’m working with students, I find that when they are trying to work in an academic style they will often use overly elaborate sentence structures, thinking that’s what academic style is. This elaboration, using compound and complex sentences, feels sophisticated. But what happens is students start to lose clarity and focus in their writing, and if you lose clarity and focus, you lose power. You lose command of language. You lose the ability to communicate to an audience and provide perspective. So I encourage them to cut those sentences down. Find your subject and verb. Use short sentences. Create power through smaller sentences. Then build them together. You’re now maximizing clarity over complexity. 

Updating Classroom Aims

So what have I not mentioned as keys to an effective writing program? I haven’t mentioned such elements as topic sentences, paragraph structures, or the organization of writing such as introductions and conclusions. I haven’t mentioned the use of evidence, which is perhaps the bulkiest aspect of the formal writing curriculum. Students certainly ought to learn MLA style for quoting, referencing and citing sources. But if these elements receive primary focus, we can lose the reason why we write in the first place.

A practical consideration is how one incorporates this view of writing into our classroom instruction. Over the years I have drawn on a few different rubrics for assessing and giving feedback on written assignments. ERB’s WrAP rubric is quite helpful. Similar rubrics exist for other standardized tests, such as the SAT or ACT. These rubrics help get at some of the nuts and bolts of academic writing. (I also use rubrics for creative writing, simply to develop categories to discuss with students.) To these one can add the two broad categories outlined above. Does this piece of writing show an awareness of audience benefit? Does this piece of writing communicate substantive perspective? When marking papers, one can add notes about how a student is connecting with a potential audience or bringing perspective. I’m also mindful to show places where these aspects can be further developed. 

Students should come away from our classes on writing feeling that writing serves a grand purpose in their lives. Writing is a craft, and they should sense that they are part of a community of craftspeople who enjoy this kind of work. Writing for the widest possible audience and giving perspective to that audience is meaningful work. Students who start viewing writing in this way find greater enjoyment in their writing tasks.

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