In 2010, a study took mirror neurons to the next level by identifying mirror neurons in humans. Scientists were able to utilize the intracranial electrodes implanted in 21 patients who were being treated for epilepsy. These subjects were presented with a number of facial expressions and hand-grasping movements to determine cellular activity in the brain. They recorded “extracellular activity from 1177 cells in human medial frontal and temporal cortices while patients executed or observed hand grasping actions and facial emotional expressions.” (Mukamel, Roy, et al. “Single-neuron responses in humans during execution and observation of actions.” Curr. Biol. vol. 20,8 (2010): 750-6.) What this means is that humans at the neurological level respond to the actions of others. There’s a link between observed action and performing the same action. The implications of mirror neurons for bolstering our understanding of the process of learning are immense. In this article we will explore some of the ways we can increase our awareness of neuronal activity in our students as well as practical strategies to optimize learning.

Do Mirror Neurons Even Exist?

Almost immediately after the groundbreaking study of mirror neurons in human studies, the idea of mirror neurons captured the collective imagination of society. Ramachandran’s popular TED talk boldly claimed that mirror neurons “shaped civilization.” It was all too easy to jump from neurological phenomena to claims of mind reading and an easy pathway to improving a free throw simply by watching expert videos. These claims seemed too good to be true, and in large part they are too good to be true.

Thus, when Gregory Hickok came out with his book, The Myth of Mirror Neurons (Norton, 2014), much of the momentum that had built up around mirror neurons was halted. In a nutshell, Hickok began to question the claims being made regarding mirror neurons. As a language specialist, he simply didn’t see the empirical evidence in his field of specialization nor in other fields, particularly as it relates to “action understanding.” His work points out “the many ways that the theory falls short on logical or empirical grounds.”

From the skepticism of Hickok and others, a taming of the field took place where more modest models were proposed. The current debate questions whether the mirror effect is based specifically in a mirror neuron, or whether there is a mirror system that combines multiple systems such as the visual cortex and premotor cortices (see e.g., Cecelia Hayes, et al “What Happened to Mirror Neurons?” Perspectives on Psychological Science,vol. 17,1 (2021): 153-68.) It is clear that areas of the brain “light up” when an individual sees the actions of another individual. Now the question is what mechanisms are activated when this occurs, and (more important for our purposes) what can we learn about human learning from these areas of the brain. Whether mirror neurons actually exist, it does seem that there is a mirroring system in place which gives us some potential to utilize imitation based on visual and motor inputs.

Visual and Motor Connections

Even though debate remains as to what mirror neurons are and how they operate within the brain, there are some fascinating connections that are almost intuitive. To mirror another person, one must be able to see them and then do actions in a similar way. Thus the visual cortex and motor neurons are central to what is going on with this mirror effect. Let’s break this down a bit further.

Both learning and memory are closely associated with visual inputs. Not only do we need visual inputs to read text, converting symbols into units of meaning, we also need visual inputs to read faces for non-verbal cues or to “read the room” for social cues. In the book Uncommon Sense Teaching, the authors describe the connection between vision and the brain:

“Your vision and hearing are processed in the back of your brain. This behind-most area matures first, in early childhood. Mental maturation—which means pruning and loss of flexibility—gradually moves toward the front of the brain. The very last area to mature is the prefrontal cortex, where planning and judgment take place. . . .The ability to adjust the brain’s connections doesn’t stop at maturity, however. New synaptic connections as well as pruning continue throughout people’s lifetimes.”

Barbara Oakley, et al, Uncommon Sense Teaching (New York: Tarcher Perigree, 2021), 90-91.

Vision is a fundamental process of the brain that comes online early in our development. What this means is that from the earliest ages we are taking in vast amounts of information through what we see and hear. One of the consequences of the mirror system is that we become what we see, in a manner of speaking. It is important, therefore, to carefully curate the visual environment of children. Presenting children with great works of art and the natural world around us stimulates a host of neural connections that cannot be duplicated with digital screens.

Movement is equally important to learning. Consider the act of writing. There are numerous fine motor skills that transform the electrical impulses of the neurons in our brains into a series of symbols that emerge almost effortlessly on the page. Aleksandr Luria writes in his book The Working Brain:

“Writing in the initial stages takes place through a chain of isolated motor impulses, each of which is responsible for the performance of only one element of the graphic structure; with practice, this structure of the process is radically altered and writing is converted into a single ‘kinetic melody,’ no longer requiring the memorization of the visual form of each isolated letter or individual motor impulses for making every stroke.’

Aleksandr Luria, The Working Brain (New York: Penguin, 1973), 32.

Learning to write involved imitation of a pattern of letters, and then eventually a pattern of phonemes in order to spell words correctly. The intersection of visual and motor cortices seems to be this mirror system where a strong exemplar is presented to brain such that it takes in these patterns in order to reproduce them with a high level of specificity.

We see these visual and motor connections not only with reading and writing, but also with a whole host of activities, from sketching to shooting a basketball. Increasing our awareness of this connection for learning should guide our decision making as we map out our classroom décor, as we schedule our days, and as we plan our lessons.

Imitation and Mimesis: The Classical Paradigm

We are mimetic by nature, at least that is what Aristotle conjectures in his Poetics. One of the exciting avenues the discovery of mirror neurons took us down is actually one that is rather quite old. The Greek term mimesis (μίμησις) means something like imitation or simulation. Both Plato and Aristotle agree that we as human beings represent nature through imitation. This occurs through poetry, literature, painting, drama, song, etc. Plato took a somewhat negative view of our mimetic nature, contemplating that the artist can never attain a full representation of the truth. Aristotle, however, took a more positive view of the imitative process, with the artist or poet creating a representation of reality that causes the viewer to experience a type of empathy with reality. In other words, the artist’s ability to bring out some aspect of truth touches us at a deep level, making us all the more aware of something profound, or tragic, or sublime, or transcendent.

The Circe Institute website provides an excellent overview of mimetic teaching. They explain mimesis with a beautiful description:

“Mimesis is an imitation, not of the outward form, but of the inner idea—not ultimately of an action, but of the idea expressed in that action. Every art and skill is mastered through these stages, whether in school or out. It is a modified inductive form of instruction in which students are led to understand ideas by contemplating models or types of them. These models can be found in literature, history, mathematics, the fine arts, music, other human arts and activities, and nature.”

“What is Mimetic Teaching?: A Lost Tools of Writing Excerpt,” (circeinstitute.org)

The web page goes on to delineate the seven stages of a mimetic lesson. At the heart of this model is imitation. The learner is presented with something and then is called upon to imitate.

Another classic expression of imitation is carried out through apprenticeship. Here the learner copies the master on their own journey toward mastery. The heart of the apprenticeship approach to learning is deliberate practice. The student is coached to acquire and hone skills across the disciplines.

The classical paradigm of imitation and mimesis have long been instrumental for learning knowledge and skills. Now recent research are identifying that there is a neurological underpinning to these time-tested modes of learning through imitation.

Paint, Sing, Act, Dance and Play

There are many practical steps we can take as educators in light of the emerging neuroscience in addition to the classical modes of mimesis and apprenticeship. Here I will spell out a few, trusting that others will emerge in your own creative planning for your students.

First, we should present to our students excellent visual content. Here we can consider great works of art. The masters we would want to imitate ought to be ever-present in our environment. But we can go beyond great works of art. Students should see examples of beautiful handwriting. They should see excellent mathematical and geometric models. They should observe the natural world, whether that is on a nature walk or bringing quality specimens into the classroom. Once we understand how important this idea of imitation is, then we can begin to bring before our students high quality examples in all parts of life.

I am quick to add here that narration dances about the connection between the visual and motor. When the student is reading or listening, the student should be visualizing in their mind by way of their imagination what is being read or told. Then in the act of telling back, that internal visualization is converted into something verbal. We are big proponents of narration here at Educational Renaissance, and there is ample reason at a neurological level to make this a regular practice in your classroom.

Second, the point of this mirror system is that our students put into practice the exemplary models placed before them. There is a moral and spiritual aspect to this. The call for excellent books is not merely to have expansive vocabulary and eloquent style. We are looking for moral virtue in the characters of literature and history. When the mind’s eye is filled with the heroic individual, we can then be called to follow that example. Consider the biblical passage of 1 Peter 2:21, “For to this you have been called, because Christ also suffered for you, leaving you an example, so that you might follow in his steps.” At the same time that Peter identifies Christ’s suffering as the means of our salvation, he also points to Christ as the mode of living we ought to carry out, with both moral and spiritual implications.

Third, the connection between the visual and motor cortices means we need to act out what it is we are learning. I think this happens naturally when young boys and girls act out the parts of an ancient Roman battle when they are playing during recess. At a neurological level, that kind of play is linking up all kinds of synapses in the brain. At another level, children are practicing something noble. It is a way of responding to what they have visualized in their minds eye and now carry out in bodily play. There is something to becoming more and more skilled at such activities as painting, singing, acting, dancing and playing. Consider the student who has many years of practice using the drybrush watercolor technique. That student’s ability to make visual and motor connections is enhanced by that growth in skill.

New from Educational Renaissance Publishing:

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For example, a teacher responsible for teaching The Great Gatsby must consider how the book will be taught, what she will focus on, and how she intends for students to develop and grow through the study. Each day, she walks into a room full of students in need of direction for approaching the text. This requires leadership.

In modern educational circles, we often speak, not of leadership, but of “classroom management.” Unfortunately, this phrase is embedded with faulty assumptions about who students are, what the purpose of learning is, and how we are to manage them toward some desirable end. As a result, classroom management techniques are problematic in two key ways.

First, classroom management techniques are often behavioristic. In other words, they seek to address the behavior of students through systems of external rewards and consequences, rather than aiming to form the whole person of the child, especially the heart. Strategies are deployed to artificially motivate behaviors of respect, obedience, service, and even kindness in a way disconnected from the child’s internal moral development. Is this child growing in a love and understanding of the idea of respect for authority? How is the child becoming more servant-hearted in her disposition? These questions are not usually asked in typical classroom management conversations.

Second, classroom management techniques are often task-oriented rather than people-oriented. This makes sense since the phrase emerged during the post-industrial revolution in which the effective and efficient completion of tasks was prized above all else. Now, at its best, modern business management theory is people-oriented, but most managers too easily slip into the mindset of “How do I get this employee to perform this task?” rather than “How do I lead this employee on a path toward growth and increasing expertise?” The latter focuses on the development of the talent and skill of people, not simply whether they are hitting the deadlines. 

To equip teachers to grow as true leaders of their students, in this article I will recommend three recently published leadership books that contain relevant ideas for classroom leadership. These resources will help teachers see their true leadership role and therefore embrace the responsibility for them to invest deeply in the lives of their students. While teachers will need to push through some of the business-focused examples of these resources, the underlying ideas are both relevant and applicable for classroom leadership today.

Multipliers by Liz Wiseman 

The first book I want to recommend is Multipliers (HarperCollins, 2017) by researcher Liz Wiseman. In this book, Wiseman sets out to show how leaders can make people under their supervision smarter, rather than targeting mere compliance. Early on, she differentiates between two managers, the Genius Maker and the Genius (9). The genius maker grows people’s intelligence by “extracting the smarts and maximum effort from each member on the team.” This type of leader talks only about 10% of the time, thereby making space for others to grow through active participation in coming up with solutions to a problem. 

In contrast, the genius is self-oriented. He is smart and successful, and everyone in the room knows who has the best ideas. He may facilitate “conversations” but soon these turn into opportunities for him to share his correct views with others. After all, he is the genius. Why not just listen to him? The result is that people do not have the permission to think for themselves or the legitimate responsibility to make decisions. It all goes back to what the genius thinks is right. 

For Wiseman, the genius maker is a multiplier of of intelligence while the genius is actually a diminisher. At heart, multipliers “invoke each person’s unique intelligence and create an atmosphere of genius–innovation, productive effort, and collective intelligence” (10). The upshot is that these leaders not only access people’s current capability, they stretch it. People actually report getting smarter under the supervision of multipliers. The fundamental assumption of a multiplier is “People are smart and will figure this out” whereas the assumption of the diminisher is “They will never figure this out without me” (20). 

Teachers can become multipliers of intelligence in their classrooms by resisting the urge to be the residential genius. Although they are older, smarter, and more experienced, these assets can be leveraged to empower their students toward growing their own abilities, rather than making it all about the teacher.

Diagnostic Questions for Teachers:

• Do you empower students in your classroom to make major contributions to class culture, discussions, learning, and skill demonstration? 
• Is there room in your classroom for students to make mistakes as you stretch them to attempt difficult assignments?
• Do you ask your students to explain complex concepts to their peers rather than yourself?
• Does your approach to grading grow student intellectual confidence or does it foster dependence on your own intelligence?

Boundaries for Leaders by Dr. Henry Cloud

Boundaries for Leaders (HarperCollins, 2013) is written by clinical psychologist Dr. Henry Cloud, an author recognized for his work on cultivating healthy relationships. In Chapter 1, he writes, “This book is about what leaders need to do in order for people to accomplish a vision” (2). The key word here for Cloud is people. He will go on to argue that people perform their best work in healthy work cultures that take into consideration the psychological well-being of both employer and employee. By setting good boundaries in place and leading in a way that people’s brains can follow, Cloud contends, good results will come. 

Cloud writes that boundaries are made up of two things: what you create and what you allow (15). A boundary is a property line, marking out who is responsible and for what. When someone is given real ownership of something, anything that happens under their supervision only happens because they created it or allowed it. 

In top-performing classrooms, teachers teach in a way that makes it possible for their students’ brains to function as they were designed (25). This happens through setting good boundaries. Cloud writes, “Show me a person, team, or a company that gets results, and I will show you the leadership boundaries that make it possible” (26).

As a psychologist, the author is aware of how the human brain works and what leaders can do to maximize brain health and productivity. In turn, teachers can use these insights as they seek to pass on knowledge, skills, and virtues to their students.

For example, it is helpful for a teacher to understand that the brain relies on three essential properties to achieve a particular task, be it the following of a classroom procedure or the completion of an assignment:

1. Attention: the ability to focus on relevant stimuli, and block out what is not relevant (“Do this”)
2. Inhibition: the ability to “not do” certain actions that could be distracting, irrelevant, or eve destructive (“Don’t do this”)
3. Working Memory: the ability to retain and access relevant information for reasoning, decision-making, and taking future actions (“Remember and build on this relevant information”)

As teachers design their lessons and think through what they want their students to accomplish for the day, it is beneficial to think through these three neurological elements for the completion of a task. When we ignore one or more of these elements, we risk short-circuiting our students optimal use of the way God designed their brains.

Diagnostic Questions for Teachers:

• What student behaviors in your classroom have you created or allowed?
• How do your lessons promote student attention on what is most important for the curricular objective?
• What procedures and expectations have you established and maintained to ensure that what is not important or destructive is not allowed in?
• How are you building your students’ working memory of key information to help them complete assignments with greater success? 

The Motive by Patrick Lencioni 

The Motive (Wiley, 2020), written especially for CEOs, explores the underlying motivation of a good leader. Author Patrick Lencioni, well-known for his book Five Dysfunctions of a Team, illustrates through a leadership parable that one’s motivation for leading will dictate what one prioritizes and how he or she spends her time.

In the parable, two types of leadership motivation are at play (135). Reward-centered leadership rests on the fundamental assumption that the leader, having been selected for the role, has arrived and therefore possesses the freedom to design her job around what she most enjoys. It is the belief that the leader’s work should be pleasant and enjoyable because the leadership position is the reward. She therefore has the freedom to avoid mundane, unpleasant, or uncomfortable work if she so pleases, which she does.

In contrast, responsibility-centered leadership assumes that leadership is all about responsibility and service. It is the belief that being a leader is responsible; therefore, the experience of leading should be difficult and challenging (though certainly not without elements of gratification). 

To be clear, Lencioni writes that no leader perfectly embodies one form of motivation or the other. But one of these motives will be predominant and leaders need to be self-aware of what drives them. Reward-centered leaders often resist and avoid doing the difficult things that only they can do for the team they are leading. As a result, the whole organization suffers.

When it comes to leading a classroom, there are all sorts of things that a teacher would prefer not to do: address difficult student behavior, call a parent with bad news to share, have “family talks” with the whole class about negative classroom culture issues, or give a low grade on an assignment. But to be the best leaders they can, teachers need to lean into these responsibilities and thereby discharge their role teacher well.

Diagnostic Questions for Teachers

• What is your motivation for becoming a teacher?
• What are the 3-5 things you can do for your class that no one else can do? 
• How are you caring for your class culture, especially rooting out dysfunctional behavior and forming healthy interpersonal dynamics?
• What kind of feedback do you give your students on their behavior and work? 
• When was the last time you had a difficult conversation with a student in which you addressed unhealthy behavior?
• When was the last time you complained about a student’s or parent’s behavior? What steps do you need to take to address it?
• How often are you reminding your students of the big picture of their education, your particular curriculum, and the core values of your classroom?

Conclusion

Teachers are the leaders of their classrooms, responsible for casting vision for their students, supporting them in their work, and cultivating healthy classroom cultures. Rather than deploying classroom management techniques which can be overly behavioristic and task-oriented, teachers should embrace their role as leaders and focus on developing their people. By helping teachers become better leaders, we will see dynamic classrooms, better learning results, and, most importantly, thriving students.

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“Why the History of Narration Matters” series:

Part 1: Charlotte Mason’s Discovery?

Part 2: Classical Roots

Part 3: Narration’s Rebirth

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

Expanding Narration’s History with Comenius: Narration’s Rebirth, Stage 2 – The Great Didactic

Expanding Narration’s History with Comenius: Narration’s Rebirth, Stage 2 – The Analytical Didactic

This series began as an attempt to wrap up the loose ends of hints and speculations I had had for years, regarding the origins of Charlotte Mason’s practice of narration. Was it her own invention? Some passages I had discovered in a rhetoric textbook from the early 1900s, and then from Quintilian and John Locke, argued otherwise. Perhaps this, then, was a test-case for the broader question of Charlotte Mason’s relationship to the classical tradition.

Since then I have been able to fill in a pretty compelling set of stepping stones for the use of narration-like practices throughout the history of education. But one major gap remained…. the Middle Ages. I am excited to announce that I have filled in that gap; or at least, I have moved up the gap in the history of narration from the Renaissance proper to the twelfth century renaissance of the high Middle Ages. The source: John of Salisbury’s Metalogicon, or defense of the verbal and logical arts of the trivium. The proponent of narration: Bernard of Chartres.

While this investigation into the history of narration began with the theme of Charlotte Mason’s place within the classical tradition of education, it has come to represent more than that for me. In our recovery movements we have focused our attention on recovering the broader and more holistic purpose of education (the Why), in contrast to modern utilitarianism and pragmatism. In addition, we have rediscovered old curricular tracks (the What), like the liberal arts themselves. But we have not delved as deeply for the gems of pedagogy, the teaching methods of the classical tradition in all their multiform glory.

This short history of narration (which I am revising and expanding into a book to be published with Educational Renaissance) aims to uncover narration as it was practiced in the tradition, turning this pedagogical gem in the light of various centuries and cultural expressions. This historical understanding will then give us a flexibility and creativity of application with the teaching practice that we couldn’t gain any other way.

With that preface, let us travel back to the late Middle Ages!

The Twelfth-Century Educational Renaissance

Daniel D. McGarry sees the twelfth century as the birthplace of modern Western pedagogy, noting that while the “constituent elements were Greek, Roman, and early Christian in origin, yet it is also true that these received new form and life in the Middle Ages.”[1] He goes on to call this momentous time period of intellectual flourishing, in which John of Salisbury lived, the “twelfth-century educational ‘renaissance’.” Whether we agree with designating the twelfth century as the birthplace of modern Western pedagogy may depend more upon our assessment of the relative merits of ancient and modern teaching methods than anything else. But the important point for our purposes is the new life, and what we can undoubtedly call the rebirth of narration, among other teaching practices that occurred during this time period.

Jerome Taylor of the University of Notre Dame also has called the twelfth century a “renaissance”, describing it as “a time when centers of education had moved from the predominantly rural monasteries to the cathedral schools of growing cities and communes; when education in the new centers was becoming specialized, hence unbalanced, according to the limited enthusiasms of capacities of particular masters”.[2] Against this backdrop, John of Salisbury wrote his Metalogicon to combat a group scholars who repudiated the value of the Trivium arts of grammar, dialectic and rhetoric, and claimed to advance on to mastery of philosophy in but a few years of study.[3]

John of Salisbury closes his discussion of the importance of full grammatical training by discussing an eminent teacher of the previous generation, Bernard of Chartres, who taught at the cathedral school there beginning in 1115. Bernard is the earliest figure to be attributed with the famous “standing on the shoulders of giants” conception.[4] With such a value for the thoughts of those who came before, it is no wonder that we see him using narration as a core teaching practice. As we have mentioned elsewhere, narration is a fundamentally pious act that accords well with a focus on classic literature and the Great Books.[5]

Bernard of Chartres Teaching Grammar

John of Salisbury begins by describing Bernard’s method of teaching grammar:

Bernard of Chartres, the greatest font of literary learning in Gaul in recent times, used to teach grammar in the following way. He would point out, in reading authors, what was simple and according to rule. On the other hand, he would explain grammatical figures, rhetorical embellishment, and sophistical quibbling, as well as the relation of given passages to other studies. He would do so, however, without trying to teach everything at one time. On the contrary, he would dispense his instruction to his hearers gradually, in a manner commensurate with their powers of assimilation.[6]

This explanatory lecture method is well attested for grammatical teachers in the tradition going right on back to Quintilian. What is noted as of special importance is Bernard’s avoidance of being pedantic about the wrong sorts of details. In his discursive commentary on texts, Bernard took a methodical and gradual approach, suiting his teaching to the receptivity of his hearers. His unique sensitivity to what his students could “assimilate” was likely borne of his practice of listening to his students narrate the next day (see below).

Proponents of narration might be inclined to see in Bernard’s method nothing more than the ineffective lecture-based approach to education that we deplore. But according to John of Salisbury, Bernard would not leave his readings of texts and lectures there, simply in the air to be remembered or not by his pupils. Instead, Bernard was aware of the necessity for mental exercise through narration or recitation:

In view of the fact that exercise both strengthens and sharpens our mind, Bernard would bend every effort to bring his students to imitate what they were hearing.[7] In some cases he would rely on exhortation, in others he would resort to punishments, such as flogging. Each student was daily required to recite part of what he had heard on the previous day. Some would recite more, others less. Each succeeding day thus became the disciple of its predecessor.[8]

Bernard’s teaching practice involved students in the imitation of the authors “that he read to them” (see n. 28). In addition, we can see that this was a required daily practice for all students – a fact that impresses us with the pedagogical value Bernard attributed to it.  John says he “would bend every effort” to this task. We might say that Bernard assigned his students homework to remember something of what he had taught them the previous day. Failing to complete your homework for Bernard’s class might have dire consequences (i.e. “flogging”). It seems at least partly ambiguous whether details from Bernard’s lecture would be included in students’ recounting of the content of the texts. But we could easily imagine commentary and text fusing together naturally when the previous day’s topics were retold by many students, one after another.

We might wonder whether the recitation that Bernard speaks of was similar to what Charlotte Mason called ‘narration’ or if it involved the word-for-word memorization of select passages from the texts Bernard read aloud, what many modern classical Christian educators and Masonites now call recitation. While the details here are somewhat ambiguous, a few factors push me in the direction of the former. First, the fact that “some would recite more, others less” seems true to life for educators who have used narration, whereas if word-for-word memorization were in view, we would expect a teacher to assign a set number of lines. Would Bernard leave it to chance which passages his students memorized? Likewise, the closing observation that each day “became the disciple of its predecessor” seems to fit better with an oral recounting of the content from the previous day by many students than memory work.

A later passage also exhibits the same ambiguity about whether narration or memorization is in view:

Bernard used also to admonish his students that stories and poems should be read thoroughly, and not as though the reader were being precipitated to flight by spurs. Wherefor he diligently and insistently demanded from each, as a daily debt, something committed to memory.[9]

It is possible that this passage refers to Bernard’s homework requirement of memorization, while the other refers to narration. Or both could refer to the same practice of narration or memorization. Either way, even if we were to conclude (which I doubt) that word-for-word memorization is intended in both these passages, we could still argue that such a heavy use of recitation (as “a daily debt”) edges into the benefits of the unique practice of narration because of how consistently and vigorously it engages the memory.

At the end of the day, it seems most likely that Bernard employed both narration and word-for-word memorization (as did Charlotte Mason and countless educators throughout history). What he was most remarkable for was his use of these imitative exercises as a daily requirement for all students. In this way, we can see the features of earlier rhetorical and grammatical teaching reinvigorated and taken seriously in a way that John of Salisbury, at least, found remarkable and rare in his own time.

Bernard’s “Conferences” and the Narration-Trivium Lesson

For classical educators who worry about a bare recital of content, Bernard’s methods went further to cultivate what we might call the higher order thinking skills and creative production of his students:

A further feature of Bernard’s method was to have his disciples compose prose and poetry every day, and exercise their faculties in mutual conferences,[10] for nothing is more useful in introductory training than actually to accustom one’s students to practice the art they are studying. Nothing serves better to foster the acquisition of eloquence and the attainment of knowledge than such conferences, which also have a salutary influence on practical conduct, provided that charity moderates enthusiasm, and that humility is not lost during progress in learning.[11]

Bernard’s “daily debt” did not only involve narration and/or memorization, but also literary composition and discussion. These “conferences” might have sounded like what we call socratic seminars, involving the discussion of ideas from the authors being read as well as their relationships and applications to other ideas. This conclusion finds support in John’s claim that they would have a “salutary [health-bringing] influence on practical conduct”. Or else, these conferences could have required students to critique one another’s prose and poetic compositions, judging their merits and flaws. In all likelihood, both sorts of discussions occurred thereby fostering both “the acquisition of eloquence and the attainment of knowledge”.

Bernard’s method of teaching grammar thus coheres broadly with the Narration-Trivium lesson structure that I have advocated for as a fusion of Charlotte Mason’s narration lesson with the classical tradition.[12] Bernard’s explanatory lectures provided the set-up or 1^st little talk that enabled his students to understand the texts that he read to them. His extended commentary on the text cleared up further difficulties and focused on the detailed development of grammatical learning. The text and proper explanation were then required to be narrated, not immediately, but the next day by each student, as much as he could remember. Students’ preparation for this task might have involved them engaging in their own sorts of retrieval practice activities (perhaps involving notes) which would enable them to tell in detail the next day. They may also have memorized word-for-word particular passages or quotations from the texts, which they might have jotted down in a commonplace journal.

Then students would engage in “conferences” where they discussed the ideas and features of the texts they were studying, based on their knowledge of the text gained through lecture and narration. Finally, they would also write their own imitative compositions, share them with others for discussion and critique, thus training them in dialectic and rhetoric, the second little talk and a creative or analytical response to the text. Instead of happening all in a single lesson, this process would begin on one day and continue into the next, a practice that I would commend as well, esp. for older students. The Narration-Trivium lesson structure is intended to be flexible and adaptable by the teacher to the nature of the subject-matter and the needs of the students.

Bernard’s Methods as a Classical Inheritance

We might be tempted to think of Bernard’s grammatical pedagogy involving narration as simply a blip on the timeline of the Middle Ages, but its resonance with the practices of the classical era should cause us to wonder whether there were many more unremembered Bernards throughout the Middle Ages at earlier monastic or church schools, who followed the traditions of genuine classical learning. Even in his own time, Bernard’s pedagogy was adopted by many, according to John, even if it died off quickly:

My own instructors in grammar… formerly used Bernard’s method in training their disciples. But later, when popular opinion veered away from the truth, when men preferred to seem, rather than to be philosophers, and when professors of the arts were promising to impart the whole of philosophy in less than three or even two years… [they] were overwhelmed by the onslaught of the ignorant mob, and retired. Since then, less time and attention have been given to the study of grammar. As a result we find men who profess all the arts, liberal and mechanical, but who are ignorant of this very first one [i.e., grammar], without which it is futile to attempt to go on to the others.[13]

John of Salisbury’s nostalgic reflections of his own quality instruction in grammar by teachers following Bernard’s approach might cause us to wonder whether the human tendency to take short cuts is really to blame for narration’s neglect. As Plato feared, writing has proved to be “a recipe not for memory, but for reminder,” filling men “not with wisdom, but with the conceit of wisdom”.[14] In all times and places, narration (alongside other genuinely classical teaching methods) represents a hard and uphill climb, but the true route to the peak of the mountain of intellectual virtue.

In this final article on the history of narration, I’ve given you a taste of the book that Educational Renaissance published in early 2022: A Short History of Narration. I hope you’ve been inspired by the history of narration and that you will buy the book to take your practice of narration to the next level. Also, check out our webinars, like Habit Training 2.0 or one on Narration 2.0, to get the practical resources and insight you need to bring ancient wisdom into modern era in your classroom!

[1] Daniel D. McGarry, “Introduction” in The Metalogicon of John of Salisbury: A Twelfth-Century Defense of the Verbal and Logical Arts of the Trivium (Mansfield Centre, CT: Martino Publishing, 2015), xv.

[2] Jerome Taylor, “Introduction” in The Didascalicon of Hugh of St. Victor: A Medieval Guide to the Arts, translated by Jerome Taylor (New York: Columbia University Press, 1961; Forgotten Books reprint, 2018), 4.

[3] He actually addresses one particular advocate whom he nicknames Cornificius for the ancient detractor of Vergil, but this may be a literary fiction, and either way, the individual represents a movement of thought, on which see John of Salisbury, Metalogicon, 11.

[4] John of Salisbury, Metalogicon, 167:

Bernard of Chartres used to compare us to [puny] dwarfs perched on the shoulders of giants. He pointed out that we see more and farther than our predecessors, not because we have keener vision or greater height, but because we are lifted up and borne aloft on their gigantic stature.

[5] See Jason Barney, A Classical Guide to Narration, 89.

[6] John of Salisbury, The Metalogicon of John of Salisbury: A Twelfth-Century Defense of the Verbal and Logical Arts of the Trivium, translated by Daniel D. McGarry (Mansfield Centre, CT: Martino Publishing, 2015), 67.

[7] The translator adds a note, ibid., 68: “Literally: what they were hearing, namely, the selections that he read to them [from the authors].”

[8] Ibid.

[9] Another note from the translator, ibid.: “Bernard apparently required of each of his students the daily recitation of some passages memorized from their current reading.”

[10] Translator’s note, ibid, 70: “collationibus, collations, conferences, comparisons. Although ‘conferences’ would seem to fit here as a translation, Webb holds that ‘comparisons’ is better….”

[11] Ibid.

[12] See www.educationalrenaissance.com for a free eBook explaining the Narration-Trivium lesson.

[13] Ibid., 71.

[14] Plato, Phaedrus in The Collected Dialogues, 520.

“Why the History of Narration Matters” series:

Part 1: Charlotte Mason’s Discovery?

Part 2: Classical Roots

Part 3: Narration’s Rebirth

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

Expanding Narration’s History with Comenius: Narration’s Rebirth, Stage 2 – The Great Didactic

Expanding Narration’s History with Comenius: Narration’s Rebirth, Stage 2 – The Analytical Didactic

The post Expanding Narration’s History in the late Middle Ages: Bernard of Chartres from John of Salisbury’s Metalogicon appeared first on .

While we know that Aelius Theon used written narration to train future orators in memory and invention, and that Quintilian saw it as a core practice connected to the ability to learn, it is not really until Comenius that narration is a central teaching method. Erasmus too recommended the narration of a teacher’s lecture, thus shifting the focus to knowledge of content and away from rhetorical style and fluency. But only Comenius made of narration a golden key to unlock the doors of knowledge to the student.

In my article on The Great Didactic we saw how Comenius envisioned teaching as opening founts of knowledge, and the process of students narrating to one another as part and parcel of the nature of knowledge itself: it must be shared! Developing his analogies from the natural world, Comenius advocated for narration under the analogy of intellectual nourishment through collection, digestion and distribution. The teacher first collects and digests knowledge, and then distributes it to others; then, in an ironic transformation the student becomes the teacher to do the same for his fellows. Thus, Comenius recommends a process of repeated narrations of content given by the teacher (or his book) with corrections by the teacher.

In this article we will explore how Comenius developed his thinking about the teaching method of narration or the student becoming the teacher in The Analytical Didactic, which is really a section of a longer work (The Methodus) that he wrote much later in life. In The Analytical Didactic 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). While his translator found in this a movement away from the fertile and imaginative quality of his first didactic (see the Introduction), my impression was of the bracing winds of truth blowing steadily through Comenius’ treatment of teaching method. Where some of Comenius’ insights seemed strained and overwrought in the analogies from nature in The Great Didactic, the crystal clarity of Comenius’ principles and applications in The Analytical Didactic leaves little that can be objected to. I encourage you to find a copy and read it yourself; it’s a book that I anticipate coming back to again and again.

Narration as Review and Examination

First of note in Comenius’ recommendations for what Charlotte Mason called narration is his focus on the importance of reviews and examinations. The whole passage that most concerns practitioners of narration comes at the end of The Analytical Didactic in a section on “how to teach rapidly, thoroughly, and agreeably” (171). His comments on review and examination reminded me of my own statements in A Classical Guide to Narration about how narration serves both as a method of assimilation and of assessment. In other words, when students narrate, they store what they are learning in long term memory, AND teachers learn what students know and don’t know.

Comenius begins by claiming that “the more anything is handled, the more familiar it becomes; consequently, if we would have our students well acquainted with anything and ready to use it, we must familiarize them with it through reviews, examinations, and frequent use” (191). He goes on to say that these “reviews and examinations” should occur “even during the process of learning”. Comenius reinforces the importance of continual review and testing through the analogy of a traveler becoming acquainted with a road through the process of going backward and forward on it, retracing his steps through narration, and then digressing along different alternate routes along the way (191-192).

Narration, Analysis and Practice

For Comenius, then, narration is not to be opposed to analytical discussion, but is complementary to it. He sums up the natural progression of learning, review and examination through three questions:

1. Has the student learned something? This will be apparent if he can repeat it.
2. Does he understand it? This will be discovered by a variety of analytical questions.
3. Does he know how to use it? This will be revealed by prescribed but unrehearsed practice. (191)

Narration is the first step in a process. This view finds expression in the Narration-Trivium lesson structure that I developed based on Charlotte Mason’s narration lesson for young children. By following up narration with dialectic or analytical discussion, teachers can help deepen students’ understanding from a bare recital to fuller comprehension. This functions like the digressions down alternate routes in Comenius’ analogy. Practice then corresponds, to some extent, to the rhetoric phase or response to the rich text.

The Student as Teacher

Comenius’ practical application of this principle involves the same ironic transformation of student into teacher that he advocated for in The Great Didactic:

We can do this by urging him not merely to pay constant heed to the demonstrations and explanations of the teacher but also to reverse the role and to demonstrate and explain the same subject to others; furthermore, he ought to see and hear others besides his teacher give these demonstrations and explanations. I must make my meaning clearer by quoting a set of verses well known in schools:

                        Often to ask, to retain what is answered, and teach what remembered,

                        These are three means that will make the disciple surpass his own master.

The third part of this advice, that about teaching what we have retained, is not sufficiently well known, nor is it commonly put into practice; yet it would be highly profitable if every student were required to teach others what he himself has just learned. Indeed, there is a great deal of truth in the saying, ‘He who teaches others educates himself,’ or, as Seneca puts it, ‘Men learn while they teach.’ This is so not merely because teaching strengthens their conceptions through repetition but also because it offers them opportunities of delving further into the subject. (See Sec. 85.) (191-192)

What Comenius adds to this discussion from his previous treatment is a new articulation of the value of teaching for deep learning. In claiming that the conceptions are strengthened through repetition, we are on the solid ground of what modern learning science calls retrieval practice. But in describing the “opportunities of delving further into the subject” we seem to add on to bare retrieval the value of elaboration or making further connections to what one already knows. Acting as the teacher doesn’t just store memories, it improves and develops insight or understanding.

Comenius then expresses this method as “a practical rule” to the effect that “every pupil should acquire the habit of also acting as a teacher” (193)—an idea that is both stunning in its simplicity and also revolutionary in terms of common teaching practice. Every student? Really? Acting as a teacher to the others? Adopting this practical rule would upend how most classrooms operate in terms of their daily practices. For the teacher who imagines that it can’t be done with any efficiency in time, remember that this passage is from Comenius’ section on rapidity and thoroughness in teaching and learning. He is not unaware of time constraints. His detailed method in the Analytical Didactic greatly resembles what he had previously shared in The Great Didactic:

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. (If there are several pupils, they should do so one after another, beginning with the more talented.) Furthermore, pupils should be instructed to relate what they learn in school to their parents or servants at home or to anyone else capable of understanding such matters. (193)

Comenius again wants the students who are more likely to have understood correctly to give the first exposition, so as to avoid the wasted time and confusion likely to result from incorrection narrations. He adds the practical expediency of having students share their knowledge at home. Assigning students to narrate stories or explain concepts in detail to their parents is not an impossible homework assignment, but one that might further several purposes of the school, especially if a school has a strong vision for parental involvement and support like many classical Christian schools.

Rationale for Narration

Comenius’ reasons for this narration practice with repeated tellings of a teacher’s demonstration or explanation are more succinct than in The Great Didactic but express the same basic thoughts:

In the first place, pupils will be more attentive to every part of the teacher’s exposition if they know that presently they will have to repeat the same matter and if each one fears that perhaps he will be the first to be asked to do so. (See Sec. 86 above.)

Second, by restating exactly what he has been taught, everyone will imprint it more deeply in his understanding and memory.

Third, if it appears that something was not understood quite correctly, this practice will offer an immediate opportunity for correction (on the great value of this see Axiom XCVII).

Fourth, it will enable teachers and pupils to make certain that they have grasped what they were supposed to grasp, for the mark of knowledge is the ability to teach.

Fifth, such frequent repetition of the same material will bring it about that even the slowest pupils may finally grasp the subject. Thereby (sixth) everyone will make swifter and sounder progress in every respect.

And thus (seventh) every pupil will become a teacher, in some degree or other; consequently, the opportunities for multiplying knowledge will be mightily increased. (193-194)

Then it will be clear how apt is the playful remark of Fortius: ‘I learned much from my teachers, more from my fellow-students, but most from my pupils.’ Or, as someone else has said, ‘The more often we impart learning, the more learned we become.’ Therein lies our enduring pleasure.[1] (194)

Comenius expresses many of the same reasons for narration that have been endorsed by more recent proponents, like Charlotte Mason. Using narration as a regular practice habituates students to pay attention, because they know that they will be held accountable. It also “imprints” the content “more deeply” on the understanding or memory, thus functioning as assimilation. And then retrieval practice with immediate feedback or correction provides the most effective way to ensure true learning. While this may seem to disagree with some of Charlotte Mason’s statements, her concerns about over-correcting young children or those new to narration have probably been misunderstood. The “bracing atmosphere of sincerity and truth” that she advocated for seems in full agreement with Comenius here, even if she emphasized the infrequency of correction needed for students trained on narration over years.

Finally, Comenius’ universal vision for the increase of Christian learning spills into his pedagogical considerations, as he imagines an army of irenic students-become-teachers advancing the cause of knowledge into every sphere of life and fighting back against the ignorance and darkness of a fallen world. And this is not just a duty or a burden to be borne, it is in our learning that we experience “our enduring pleasure,” Comenius says with a wink as he ends his treatise. I cannot help but hear resonances with the flow experience and the joy of learning that I have explored at length in my book The Joy of Learning. For Comenius this method of learning through teaching is not just logical, reasonable, thoughtful and humane, it advances the cause of knowledge itself and brings delight.

[1] Comenius writes this sentence in German: “Und so bleibet man immer bey der lust.”

“Why the History of Narration Matters” series:

Part 1: Charlotte Mason’s Discovery?

Part 2: Classical Roots

Part 3: Narration’s Rebirth

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

Expanding Narration’s History with Comenius: Narration’s Rebirth, Stage 2 – The Great Didactic

The post Expanding Narration’s History with Comenius: Narration’s Rebirth, Stage 2 – The Analytical Didactic appeared first on .

But it should not be thought that I plan wholly to neglect moral and spiritual virtues in the rest of this series on Aristotle’s Five Intellectual Virtues. After all, a main point of my previous article was that the moral, intellectual and spiritual categories are overlapping and interpenetrating categories, at least for the apostle Paul. For Aristotle as well, the moral and intellectual categories interact and intermingle in unique ways. This in fact is what makes Aristotle the proper antidote to Bloom and his cognitive taxonomy: breaking down the rigid separation between the heart and the head, let alone the hands.

In this article we continue laying the foundation for a taxonomy of Aristotle’s intellectual virtues by exploring the unique relationship between Aristotle’s conception of moral virtues and one particular intellectual virtue, techne, which I prefer to translate as artistry or craftsmanship, though many translators use the English term ‘art’. Modern English speakers will find this confusing and unhelpful, because the term ‘art’ is almost exclusively used nowadays to refer to particular fine arts, like drawing, painting and sculpture. But the Latin root had a similar range and meaning to the Greek techne, which could refer to any craft or productive skill. (In a similar way the modern English term ‘science’ was narrowed to refer to only natural science, or the knowledge that we have discovered about the natural world, when it had previously referred to knowledge in general, as in the Latin scientia or Greek episteme. See the article “The Classical Distinction between the Liberal Arts and Sciences”.)

According to Aristotle, moral virtue and artistry are allies and analogues to one another, because they both are cultivated by means of habit or custom. It will therefore be helpful to our broader purpose to explore this relationship between the body, the heart and the mind, summed up in what we call habits, in order to pave the way for a full explication of the educational goal of techne or craftsmanship in a classical Christian paradigm. Our primary text for this exploration comes from book II of Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, though we will bring Charlotte Mason’s thought and modern neuroscience into the dialogue as well.

Excellence Comes by Habit… or At Least Some Excellences

The well-known quotation from Aristotle, “Excellence comes by habit…” is at least partially a misquotation, since arete, virtue or excellence, in Aristotle is divided into two types, moral and intellectual. To only one of these does the power of habit apply as the main method of cultivating virtue. The full quotation from the opening of Book II of the Nicomachean Ethics reads as follows:

Excellence, then, being of two kinds, intellectual and moral, intellectual excellence in the main owes both its birth and its growth to teaching (for which reason it requires experience and time), while moral excellence comes about as a result of habit, whence also its name [ethike for “moral”] is one that is formed by a slight variation from the word for ‘habit’ [ethos].

Nicomachean Ethics, 1103a.14-19, rev. Oxford trans. vol. II (Princeton, 1984), p. 1742

The word translated ‘teaching’, didaskalia, is the common term for ‘instruction’ used in the New Testament as well, and means exactly what we would think: the work of an instructor in teaching truths and skills, whether in a formal or informal setting. It will not do its work in a moment, but will involve time and a host of experiences in which the student’s mind is formed for whatever intellectual virtue is being cultivated. 

This bare statement puts the lie to some extreme modern versions of Rousseau, like unschooling, that deny the need for a teacher or instructor, and posit that a child has enough resources in himself to cultivate his own intellect and grow and develop the intellectual virtues needed for life. It is true that books can serve as teachers to the disciplined and curious mind, and so the supposed exceptions to this—the self-taught geniuses of the world—are really the exceptions that prove the rule, since they invariably relied on the instruction of others, even though through more independent means like books. On the other hand, people certainly can learn things through their own experience. Otherwise how would the human race have ever learned anything? But learning from personal experience is in general a horribly inefficient process; therefore, the systematic and thoughtful instruction of a teacher is the regular and normal route to intellectual excellence.

It is also worth noting here that the cultivation of habits is not the primary method for the development of intellectual virtue, but only of moral virtue for Aristotle. We will see later that techne or artistry is an exception to that, in a way. But for the time being it is worth sitting with this idea and comparing it with other thinkers like Charlotte Mason or Maria Montessori. In emphasizing the personhood of the child, Mason, for one, is sometimes heard by moderns as endorsing the unschooling extreme just mentioned. In reality, she regularly called attention to the primacy of God-given authority and children’s need for intellectual food, primarily in the form of the best books of the best minds. Like most moderns, she makes a firmer distinction between curriculum and instruction than Aristotle, in order to claim that teachers should use living books, rather than provide their own worked-up lectures. This idea might have been lost on Aristotle because of his different context. In the ancient world books were not regularly read silently, and were not easily and cheaply procured. But it is this book-based process of instruction that allows Mason to endorse what she calls “self-education” as the only true education, and not a Rousseauian anti-civilization, anti-authority stance on human development. 

Mason also believes that the formation of habits, both intellectual and moral, is a third part of education. We should note that, for Mason, habits are intellectual as well as moral. Outward customs have moved inward to cover what we can call today habitual “trains of thought”, an idiom that evokes Mason’s favorite metaphor for habits as the railways of life. Is this then, perhaps, an area of disagreement between Charlotte Mason and the great philosopher Aristotle? That, for her, habits are intellectual as well as moral? Let’s look closer at what she says in her discussion of education as a discipline from her 6th volume:

By this formula we mean the discipline of habits formed definitely and thoughtfully whether habits of mind or of body. Physiologists tell us of the adaptation of brain structure to habitual lines of thought, i.e., to our habits.

Education is not after all to either teacher or child the fine careless rapture we appear to have figured it. We who teach and they who learn are alike constrained; there is always effort to be made in certain directions; yet we face our tasks from a new point of view. We need not labour to get children to learn their lessons; that, if we would believe it, is a matter which nature takes care of. Let the lessons be of the right sort and children will learn them with delight. The call for strenuousness comes with the necessity of forming habits; but here again we are relieved. The intellectual habits of the good life form themselves in the following out of the due curriculum in the right way. As we have already urged, there is but one right way, that is, children must do the work for themselves. They must read the given pages and tell what they have read, they must perform, that is, what we may call the act of knowing. We are all aware, alas, what a monstrous quantity of printed matter has gone into the dustbin of our memories, because we have failed to perform that quite natural and spontaneous ‘act of knowing,’ as easy to a child as breathing and, if we would believe it, comparatively easy to ourselves. The reward is two-fold: no intellectual habit is so valuable as that of attention; it is a mere habit but it is also the hall-mark of an educated person. Use is second nature, we are told; it is not too much to say that ‘habit is ten natures,’ and we can all imagine how our work would be eased if our subordinates listened to instructions with the full attention which implies recollection––Attention is not the only habit that follows due self-education. The habits of fitting and ready expression, of obedience, of good-will, and of an impersonal outlook are spontaneous bye-products of education in this sort. So, too, are the habits of right thinking and right judging; while physical habits of neatness and order attend upon the self-respect which follows an education which respects the personality of children. (vol. 6, pp. 99-100)

Interestingly, Mason makes a distinction between “habits of mind and habits of body”. Of course, she knows very well that all habits make a “mark upon the brain substance” from the latest science of her day (vol. 6 p. 100). And so, in a way it is redundant to call any habit a habit of mind or of body, since a habit is in its very essence, bodily, or physical, as well as mental, i.e. registering in the brain. These reflections challenge again the simplistic divisions made by Bloom and his colleagues in proposing a division of educational goals into a cognitive domain, an affective domain and a psychomotor domain. If the brain registers in all of these, and they all have outward bodily expressions, then we have perhaps hit up against the limits of our traditional metaphors for the nature of the human person. Head, heart and hands are irreducibly intertwined through the human nervous system. Aristotle was most certainly not aware of these insights about the brain and other vital organs, even if he did more than his fair share to advance science and human physiology in his time.

On the other hand, Charlotte Mason does seem to share with Aristotle this conception that “intellectual habits” come from instruction, if we view curriculum and proper teaching methods as a specification of Aristotle’s didaskalia or instruction. As she says, the “intellectual habits of the good life form themselves in the following out of the due curriculum in the right way.” She cites attention and the act of knowing, perhaps chiefly embodied in her teaching method of narration, as “the right way”. Mason’s “self-education”, then, does not resolve itself into a call for unschooling, but for a more rigorous adherence to the right books and the right methods by which a child’s own intellectual powers will grow and find their full development.

Her concern coheres broadly with Aristotle’s focus on intellectual virtues generally, since arete involves the active engagement of the individual in means and ends. It may owe “its birth and growth to teaching,” but it has a life of its own; it is not something that a teacher can mechanistically instill in a person, as a waitress pours water into a glass. The organic metaphors used by Mason find their expression in Aristotle as well. 

In addition, it is the nature of the human person that habit training and teaching are meant to develop. As he goes on to say at the beginning of Book II following the passage quoted above:

From this it is also plain that none of the moral excellences arises in us by nature; for nothing that exists by nature can form a habit contrary to its nature. For instance the stone which by nature moves downwards cannot be habituated to move upwards, not even if one tries to train it by throwing it up ten thousand times; nor can fire be habituated to move downwards, nor can anything else that by nature behaves in one way be trained to behave in another. Neither by nature, then, nor contrary to nature do excellences arise in us; rather we are adapted by nature to receive them, and are made perfect by habit. 

Nicomachean Ethics, 1103a.19-25, pp. 1742-1743

Modern science might cause us to stumble over Aristotle’s examples here, because the discovery of gravity and chemical reactions like combustion throw a wrench in his system. But for Aristotle, things move downward because it is in their nature to do so; they have an internal telos or goal toward which they head of their own accord. For stones this telos is down, but for fire it is up. The point of the examples is that human beings too have a telos and this is excellence, but we do not have excellence “by nature”, otherwise no training would be necessary or even possible. You can’t habituate a stone to fly upwards of its own accord. But you can habituate a human person to act justly or eat temperately. 

But I ask again, is this only true of moral virtues and not also of intellectual ones? Can’t we be habituated to think in a certain way?

The Analogy between Morality and Artistry

For Aristotle it is important to distinguish between abilities we have by nature and those that are developed by practice. In a way, this devolves into the age-old debate between the relative importance of nature and nurture. As he says,

Again, of all the things that come to us by nature we first acquire the potentiality and later exhibit the activity (this is plain in the case of the senses; for it was not by often seeing or often hearing that we got these senses, but on the contrary we had them before we used them, and did not come to have them by using them); but excellences we get by first exercising them, as also happens in the case of the arts as well. For the things we have to learn before we can do, we learn by doing, e.g. men become builders by building and lyre-players by playing the lyre; so too we become just by doing just acts, temperate by doing temperate acts, brave by doing brave acts. (p. 1743)

Aristotle’s point is that sight is an ability we have by nature. The potential to see is formed in the very nature of a human person (from pupil and retina to optic nerve and brain structure); seeing, therefore, comes without any practice. The first time a baby opens its eyes it sees. (Perhaps we shouldn’t rabbit-trail into how distinguishing between objects and developing facial recognition, for instance, are extremely complex skills that the brain is practically hardwired to develop on its own, for which it nevertheless requires significant time, experience and practice, and which is influenced by the development of habits….) 

Both morality and artistry, however, do not come by nature but by exercise or practice. As the saying goes, “One swallow does not a summer make.” One just act does not make a man just. Nor does constructing one building make a man an architect. Through deliberate or purposeful practice of particular activities, the habit of doing them is elevated to the level of excellence. Excellence in morality and artistry then comes by habit… but not by a habit that is thoughtless. As my gymnastic coach drilled into me as a youth, “Practice does not make perfect. Practice makes permanent. Perfect practice makes perfect.” Aristotle further details the point in his ongoing analogy between moral excellence and craftsmanship:

Again, it is from the same causes and by the same means that every excellence is both produced and destroyed, and similarly every art; for it is from playing the lyre that both good and bad lyre-players are produced. And the corresponding statement is true of builders and of all the rest; men will be good or bad builders as a result of building well or badly. For if this were not so, there would have been no need of a teacher, but all men would have been born good or bad at their craft. This, then, is the case with the excellences also; by doing the acts that we do in our transactions with other men we become just or unjust, and by doing the acts that we do in the presence of danger, and being habituated to feel fear or confidence, we become brave or cowardly. The same is true of appetites and feelings of anger; some men become temperate and good-tempered, others self-indulgent and irascible, by behaving in one way or the other in the appropriate circumstances. Thus, in one word, states arise out of like activities. This is why the activities we exhibit must be of a certain kind; it is because the states correspond to the differences between these. It makes no small difference, then, whether we form habits of one kind or of another from our very youth; it makes a great difference, or rather all the difference. (p. 1743)

In this passage Aristotle comes full circle and justifies the need of a teacher for artistry (even though he hasn’t yet listed it among his five intellectual virtues). It is possible to build many buildings, and only confirm the builder in mediocrity, or worse, poor quality or shoddy building. In the same way, I needed a coach to become a gymnast, to correct my poor form on various exercises, to instruct me to point my toes, keep my legs straight and tuck my head in during handstands. Otherwise, I would develop bad habits early on that would make advancement in good gymnastics impossible. 

Notice how coaching in artistry requires a competent teacher who is sufficiently advanced in the craft to pass along the basic principles of proper form or good quality, along with the judgment to correct errors and mistakes. As I advanced in gymnastics, I could practice more and more on my own, because I had developed the mental architecture for quality gymnastics and had internalized the basic principles of the craft. Watching and imitating Olympic gymnasts as they demonstrate exquisite form might also spur my growth and development of excellence. 

Aristotle argues that it is much the same with moral virtues. While he doesn’t explicitly mention parents and tutors, his final appeal that it makes all the difference what habits we form from our youth seems targeted to raise the bar for those who have charge of the young. Early habit training is the determining factor in the later development of moral character. But this should not be construed in such a way as to remove the value of thinking and deliberating over moral choices. For Aristotle one cannot have the moral virtues without also attaining the intellectual virtue of phronesis, practical wisdom or prudence. And we dare not undervalue the importance of artistry or craftsmanship of all types, which involves the development of cultivated habits as well as a true course of reasoning. 

Resolving the Nature-Nurture Debate: Myelin, Habits and Skill

From the perspective of modern research the nature-nurture debate for both skill and moral action seems to have been substantively resolved. The key is not exactly neurons and synapses, but myelin, a white fatty substance that is wrapped around neural networks after they are repeatedly fired. As Dr. George Bartzokis, professor of neurobiology at UCLA said, myelin is “the key to talking, reading, learning skills, being human” (As quoted in Daniel Coyle, The Talent Code [Bantam, 2009], 32). Neuroscientists claim that “the traditional neuron-centric worldview is being fundamentally altered by a Copernican-style revolution” based on three basic facts:

1. Every human movement, thought, or feeling is a precisely timed electric signal traveling through a chain of neurons—a circuit of nerve fibers. 
2. Myelin is the insulation that wraps these nerve fibers and increases signal strength, speed, and accuracy. 
3. The more we fire a particular circuit, the more myelin optimizes that circuit, and the stronger, faster and more fluent our movements and thoughts become. (Coyle, The Talent Code, 32)

Notice that what we call body, heart and head are equally susceptible to the neural network process. In addition, the repetition of particular acts, thoughts or feelings in a certain context creates what we call a ‘habit’, a propensity for or ease of repeating that same act, thought or feeling again. Deep or focused practice tends to wrap myelin more quickly and efficiently. 

As Aristotle claimed more than 2,000 years ago, “Neither by nature, then, nor contrary to nature do excellences arise in us; rather we are adapted by nature to receive them, and are made perfect by habit.” We cannot make a habit or skill of doing something physically impossible. But if we have the ability to do something, we can get better and better and better at it through practice, until even our original abilities have been fundamentally altered and developed. Nature provides the hardware for the myelin wrapping process, while nurture (including all our choices, actions, thoughts and feelings) actually wraps the myelin. As Daniel Coyle explains, 

Instead of prewiring for specific skills, what if the genes dealt with the skill issue by building millions of tiny broadband installers [i.e. myelin-wrapping oligodendrocytes] and distributing them throughout the circuits of the brain? The broadband installers wouldn’t be particularly complicated—in fact, they’d all be identical, wrapping wires with insulation to make the circuits work faster and smoother. They would work according to a single rule: whatever circuits are fired most, and most urgently, are the ones where the installers will go. Skill circuits that are fired often will receive more broadband; skills that are fired less often, with less urgency, will receive less broadband.

Coyle, The Talent Code, 71-72.

Memory, habits, skill development, all of human educational goals, in fact, seem to have this process at their root, even if they cannot ultimately be reduced to it.

As Christians, we may get nervous at all this talk of the brain and neurons, because of the real and present danger of reducing the mind or spirit to the matter and electrical signals of the brain. So we would do well to put a stake in the ground with Charlotte Mason on this point and clarify that we believe the mind is more than the brain. We are not evolutionary materialists. “There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy” (Shakespeare’s Hamlet I.5). But having clarified our spiritual frame of reference, perhaps these findings of neuroscience are precisely what we should have expected: God has made us as trifold beings, body, soul and spirit, situated between heaven and earth:

When I look at your heavens, the work of your fingers,

The moon and the stars, which you have set in place,

What is man that you are mindful of him,

And the son of man that you care for him?

Yet you have made him a little lower than the heavenly beings

And crowned him with glory and honor.

You have given him dominion over the works of your hands;

You have put all things under his feet…. (Psalm 8:3-6 ESV)

Our glory as human beings is our middle placement, our intertwined nature, participating in the intellectual nature of the angels and the physical nature of beasts. Flesh and spirit intermingle and interact, and the nervous system gives us a glimmer of insight into how. Our habits, practice and skill development involve fleshly acquirements in body and brain, but they are nonetheless spiritual. Moral and intellectual virtues can be trained by practice. As the author of Hebrews says, “But solid food is for the mature, for those who have their powers of discernment trained by constant practice to distinguish good from evil” (Heb 5:14 ESV). Discernment is an important Christian intellectual virtue mentioned frequently in the New Testament. And according to Hebrews it, too, is “trained by practice”.

In the next article we will explore the differences between moral training and training in techne or craftsmanship, introducing the modern concepts of deliberate practice, coaching and the apprenticeship model.

Earlier Articles in this series:

Bloom’s Taxonomy and the Purpose of Education

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

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

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

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

Aristotle’s Virtue Theory and a Christian Purpose of Education

The post Moral Virtue and the Intellectual Virtue of Artistry or Craftsmanship appeared first on .

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Charlotte Mason, School Education, vol 3 pg 170

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

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

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

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

Exceptions to Focusing on Rich Texts Only

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Earlier articles in this series:

Part 1: Charlotte Mason’s Discovery?

Part 2: Classical Roots

Part 3: Narration’s Rebirth

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

At this point in the series, we pivot to the formation of individuals in our classrooms. We will see that the tools available to us come in very familiar forms. We will also see how the classical art of rhetoric enables students to express their unique prophetic voices with thoughtfulness, skill and eloquence.

Previous articles in this series, Training the Prophetic Voice:

Part 1: The Educational Heart of God

Part 2: Speaking Truth to Power

Part 3: The Schools of the Prophets

Part 4: Jesus as Prophetic Trainer

Internalizing the Prophetic Message

Before anyone can speak prophetically, one must be connected with the content of divine revelation. The Word of God is living and active, and therefore has the capacity to speak today in our lives personally as well as to speak to the needs of our society. I can think of no higher calling for a teacher than to impart to the students given into her care the internalization of God’s Word. Let’s explore what this means carefully.

Learning scripture is about more than gaining a knowledge of the content of the Bible. Throughout the Word the people of God are called to a proper affective response to the Word. So for instance, the worship of God is to be done with reverence and awe (Heb. 12:28). To be instructed in divine wisdom entails humility in our disposition (Prov. 15:33). The attitude we are cultivating in our students is one of seeking the Lord without pride or self-righteousness, so that they may walk humbly with God and care to live out his just commands (Zeph. 2:3). Cultivating the affective domain enables the student to avoid hypocritical legalism or entitled antinomianism.

Other affective responses to scripture that ought to be cultivated among students are joy and wonder. The Psalmist writes in the great acrostic poem about scripture that God’s testimonies are “the joy of my heart” (Ps. 119:111). Our tendency as educators may be to aim for interpretive exactitude as we teach the Bible. This may be the result of training students in proper interpretive methods or of promoting our theological tradition. However, we can sometimes steal the inherent joy and wonder the reader of the Bible can have. The Word is God’s communication to us, his people. I don’t want to place a false dichotomy here. We can strive for highly accurate interpretations of scripture without robbing our students of the joy they can take in the text. However, as we evaluate our students in an educational environment, it can be easier to determine whether they have “correct” answers, thereby implying that precision is more important than joy and wonder.

Ultimately, a full-orbed internalization of the prophetic message relies on good interpretive practices as well as a responsiveness to the prophetic message at an affective level. We as the people of God are called to be transformed by the message of scripture. This means that there needs to be a spirit-led responsiveness to the text that comes through an understanding that God’s Word speaks to us today. To cultivate this among my students, I have devoted time on a regular basis to have them personally reflect on scripture, journal their thoughts and pray about how God is speaking to them through scripture. Sometimes this happens at school, but I have also encouraged students to take a prayer walk in nature, opening their hearts and minds to listen to the still, small voice of the Lord.

Using Narration to Internalize the Prophetic Message

Scripture memory is a powerful tool for those who really want to live a disciplined Christian life. Mere memorization, though, can be a liability for a few reasons. One of the most meaningful phases of my growth as a young Christian occurred in college when I was involved in the Navigators campus ministry. It was there that scripture memory was allied to personal discipleship. I grew tremendously in my scriptural knowledge. But I also encountered two simultaneous temptations. One temptation was to view the discipline of scripture memory as a work of personal righteousness. If I hadn’t memorized as much as one of my peers, I felt as though I was somehow a lesser Christian. Another temptation was to take pride in my ability to memorize scripture. There were moments when I could show off all I had memorized. To be fair, despite these temptations, I have benefitted greatly from the scripture that was memorized largely because of the promise that God’s word “shall not return to me empty” (Isa. 55:11).

Here is where the practice of narration can be so effective in mitigating some of the temptation of rote memorization. When one narrates, the reader internalizes the sequence, phrases and ideas of the text and then tells it back. This act of assimilation can be more powerful than mere memorization, as Charlotte Mason explains:

“He will find that in the act of narrating every power of his 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 memorise, we repeat over and over a passage or a series of points or names with the aid of such clues as we can invent; we do memorise a string of facts or words, and the new possession serves its purpose for a time, but it is not assimilated; its purpose being served, we know it no more. This is memory work by means of which examinations are passed with credit. I will not try to explain (or understand!) this power to memorise;––it has its subsidiary use in education, no doubt, but it must not be put in the place of the prime agent which is attention.”

Charlotte Mason, Towards a Philosophy of Education, 16.

Note the liability of memorization she points out. Memorization can give the feeling that something has been assimilated, but it has not become a part of the personal experience of the learner. As we train the prophetic voice of our students, the internalization of scripture must engage the whole person of the child. It should excite the imagination by having the student visualize the scenery and the argument. The mind is most engaged by observing details set within the whole of the surrounding passage. What we most want is to enable the mind of the student to be filled with a storehouse of scripture not merely at the word-perfect level of memorization, but with a full comprehension of the text that is appropriated imaginatively.

Telling scripture back through narration trains the student to express the message and meaning of scripture immediately after an initial contact with scripture. In this way, we are cultivating a practice of speaking aloud God’s revelation on a daily basis. This is the essence of the prophetic voice and it occurs in small moments after reading the Bible each day. A child well practiced in narrating scripture is well on his way to using his prophetic voice in life.

Habit Training as a Means to Internalizing the Prophetic Voice

The assimilation of scripture is not only an intellectual exercise since the message of scripture is to be lived out. James challenges us to have an active faith since, “faith by itself, if it does not have works, is dead” (James 2:17). Many have stumbled over this passage because of the Pauline doctrine of faith alone apart from the works of the law. However, James and Paul seem to be singing from the same hymn book. James is simply saying that a faith not lived out is not actually a living faith.

As teachers or parents, we can help children put feet to their biblical faith by carefully considering habits or practices to incorporate in daily life. Charlotte Mason devotes special attention to spiritual habits (we might call them spiritual disciplines) in her third book, School Education. She speaks about cultivating the habits of the religious life such that they begin with compelling ideas about God so that our practices are invested with the savor of communing with God. We can create little forms to express worship, reverence and devotion to God. She writes, “It is a mistake to suppose that the forms of reverence need be tiresome to them. They love little ceremonies, and to be taught to kneel nicely while saying their short prayers would help them to a feeling of reverence in after life.” (Vol. 3, pg. 141) Learning reverence is a delight to the child, and we can set up cues that enable the student to have a moment of personal connection with her Lord.

It is not surprising to find in our churches that there are cues and practices that draw us into a sense of God’s presence. We learn to habitually pray in certain ways and to find certain practices meaningful in our expression of worship. These kinds of cues and practices can be drawn into our homes and classrooms. Mason writes, “The chair, or the bedside, or the little prayer-table, or, best of all, the mother’s knee, plays no small part in framing the soul to a habit of devotion.” (Vol. 3, pg. 142) Note how the goal is not to make the chair or bedside a little temple. Instead, the soul is the actual temple for the indwelling Christ. Yet, establishing a place where a sense of God’s holiness can be experienced in a special way cultivates this habit of devotion to the Lord.

Paul instructs fathers in Ephesians to bring up children “in the discipline and instruction of the Lord.” (Eph. 6:4) The word for discipline here is παιδεία which means training or molding. We can contrast this word with Paul’s use of ὑπωπιάζω in 1 Cor. 9:27, which has the sense of beating the body into submission. In Ephesians 6:4, the job for parents is to positively set the child on a course toward the Lord. This happens when we place in their lives objects and practices that incline them toward God. Habit training envisions the best for the child and then sets up structures to realize this vision in daily practices. You can read more about the connection of habit training and our Christian faith in my article “Christ our Habitude.“

I have seen this at work in my son’s life. One summer we made it a practice to have a short devotional each morning after his breakfast. The Egan boys usually are up before everyone else, so we had this alone time. There was something special about moment each day, and we simply sat on the couch together reading short passages of scripture. Even though I created a structure, he soon checked in with me, “Are we doing devotional this morning?” He had internalized the specialness of that moment, and his heart was positively inclined toward the Lord. That lives with him even now, years later, as he has accumulated many moments of divine joy. A morning connection with God is a well-formed habit.

Clean Your Room

In this article, we have been discussing the concept of internalizing the prophetic message. That’s because before one can go out and prophetically speak to address the concerns of our world, the message must first be taken into the individual. In keeping with this idea, it is likewise important for the message to have its transformative effect first on the individual. Here I want to explore the idea that a person cannot begin to solve the world’s problems until the student has begun to address the problems in his or her own life.

Jordan Peterson in his book 12 Rules for Life lays out a perspective on responsibility taking as a prerequisite to prophetic speech. He articulates this in his sixth rule: “Set your house in perfect order before you criticize the world.” This rule has become something of an internet meme as it was expressed in various places by Peterson as “clean up your room.” You can watch his elaboration of this idea here. The point he is making is that the arena to practice applying the prophetic message is in the most immediate and personal sphere. If your room is in disarray, how can you possibly go about fixing a world in disarray?

To speak the truth, one must be completely aligned with the truth as it gets expressed in daily living. “If we say we have fellowship with him while we walk in darkness, we lie and do not practice the truth.” (1 John 1:6) The first person truth must be proclaimed to is oneself. It is in the personal encounter with truth that the would-be prophet experiences the veracity of the truth to be proclaimed. This is where conviction gets set. The goal is not just to know true things, but to exert our wills such that our lives are conformed to the truth.

When I talk about internalizing the prophetic message, this notion of living out the truth in practical ways during daily life has something to it. If a child can learn to transform himself and his environment by being brutally honest with himself, then he has taken responsibility in the smallest and most immediate sphere. The little white lie must be confronted as the little tyke says to himself, “I am a dishonest person, and that must change.” Then he goes about rooting out falsehood, becoming an honest person. Perhaps the child looks about his room and sees the Legos strewn about. The light of truth reveals how much chaos and disorder is in his life. As he works to clean his room, he is learning responsibility and begins to marshal resources to solve problems in his little world.

Training the Prophetic Voice

For us as teachers we have many opportunities to cultivate the internalization of the prophetic voice in our classrooms. We should create environments where honesty and truth telling are highly valued. What I mean by this is that we expect of our students to say what they mean, and not accept little falsehoods, blame shifting or cute excuses. Speaking the truth is not about tattling on a classmate. Instead, speaking truth is about encountering the truth about oneself and then being given the support to do something about it.

Early in this article, we talked about learning the message of scripture and acquiring proper affective responses to God and his Word. One aspect of our environments should be a consistent and regular encounter with a personal and holy God. The spirit is there to comfort and convict. As we train our students, they must learn to be sensitive to God’s work in their life.

Using the tools available to us, such as narration and habit training, our students can be directed toward living lives consistent with the message of scripture. As teachers, we can often see avenues for their growth. There are insights we can share to help them “see the light” of truth. Are they consistently late to school? Is their math homework sloppy? Can their handwriting improve? Are they tipping in their chair? We teachers can speak truth to our students (or better have the students speak truth about themselves) in a supportive and caring way. Then we help them bring their lives into conformity with the truth by helping them come up with strategies be on time, tidy up their math homework, improve their handwriting or sit properly in their chair.

One day our students will go out into the world to encounter the problems they see there. They will need to use their prophetic voices to criticize and correct the world. Before they can do that, they will need to internalize the prophetic message. When we have this vision for our students, it adds meaning and purpose to our daily work in the classroom.

Other articles in this series, Training the Prophetic Voice:

Part 1: The Educational Heart of God

Part 2: Speaking Truth to Power

Part 3: The Schools of the Prophets

Part 4: Jesus as Prophetic Trainer

Part 6: Classical Rhetoric for the Modern World

The post Training the Prophetic Voice, Part 5: Internalizing the Prophetic Message 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 .

What did Sayers share that day that elicited such a response decades later? 

In her own British way, the writer and poet articulated a forceful critique of modern education and then provided a compelling solution. At the 30,000 foot level, her critique was that modern educational methods were failing to equip students to learn for themselves. Her solution? Recover the lost tools of learning, also known as the liberal arts, in order to equip students to do the work of learning and be prepared for the complexities of life ahead.

In this article, I aim to demonstrate congruity between the classical principle of self-education and Doug Lemov’s concept of “Ratio” in Teach Like a Champion 2.0. This is a continuation of my ongoing series on “Teach Like a Champion in Classical Perspective.” Lemov is a leader in the charter school movement who is passionate about distilling the best techniques for the craft of teaching. Using data from state achievement tests as a starting point, Lemov and his team observed hundreds of top teachers across the nation to identify proven techniques for student success. Today I will specifically examine how Lemov’s concept of “Ratio” works well to support what Sayers believed to be the purpose of formal education: to train students to learn for themselves.

A Problem to be Solved

First, let’s get clear on the problem of modern education, as Sayers sees it. She opens her essay by criticizing modern educational methods for failing to prepare students to navigate the complexities of the modern world. In an age of mass-marketing and propaganda, schools were doing little to equip students to discern right from wrong in difficult situations where the truth is not immediately evident.

Sayers writes:

Has it ever struck you as odd, or unfortunate, that to-day, when the proportion of literacy throughout Western Europe is higher than it has ever been, people should have become susceptible to the influence of advertisement and mass-propaganda to an extent hitherto unheard-of and unimagined? Do you put this down to the mere mechanical fact that the press and the radio and so on have made propaganda much easier to distribute over a wide area? Or do you sometimes have an uneasy suspicion that the product of modern educational methods is less good than he or she might be at disentangling fact from opinion and the proven from the plausible?

It is incredible how firmly this punch, which was thrown over seventy years ago, lands today. The fact that Sayers wrote the preceding paragraph before the rise of the internet, social media, and the recent phenomenon of “fake news,” is fascinating. If the “press” and the “radio” were propagating mistruths and fallacious thinking back in the 1940’s, how much worse is the problem today? Who is preparing students to navigate such deceptive terrain? According to our lecturer, not schools.

And yet, Sayers isn’t quite finished; she continues her attack on modern education with a barrage of questions:

Do you ever find that young people, when they have left school, not only forget most of what they have learnt (that is only to be expected) but forget also, or betray that they have never really known, how to tackle a new subject for themselves? Are you often bothered by coming across grown-up men and women who seem unable to distinguish between a book that is sound, scholarly and properly documented, and one that is to any trained eye, very conspicuously none of these things? Or who cannot handle a library catalogue? Or who, when faced with a book of reference, betray a curious inability to extract from it the passages relevant to the particular question which interests them?

Here Sayers identifies an even deeper problem ingrained within modern educational methods. According to Sayers, not only were schools in her day releasing students into the world ripe for the picking by propagandists and media producers, they were failing to prepare students to learn for themselves. Schools, instead of preparing a generation of students capable of thinking independently and equipped with the wisdom to navigate complex situations, were graduating men and women who remain dependent upon the thinking of others. Sayers concludes:

They [teachers] are doing for their pupils the work which the pupils themselves ought to do. For the sole true end of education is simply this: to teach men how to learn for themselves; and whatever instruction fails to do this is effort spent in vain.

What Sayers is referring to here is the classical principle of self-education. This is the idea that, as the saying goes, it is better to teach a man to fish rather than to merely give him one. Students need to learn how to learn if they are going to navigate this world wisely and virtuously.

Elevating the Ratio

Keeping what Sayers has said about the need for students to learn for themselves, let’s now examine what Doug Lemov writes about “Ratio.” For Lemov, the whole point of ratio is to get students to do as much of the cognitive work as possible. The more work students are required to do, the greater the ratio, and the more effective the teaching. Of course, Lemov isn’t interested in students engaging in any sort of learning activity, but the kind of work that is truly cognitively demanding. He frames three different approaches for making this happen: questioning, writing, and discussing. 

First, though, he clarifies that student participation itself is not equivalent to ratio. It is possible to have a high rate of class participation and yet low ratio with regards to rigorous cognitive work. Likewise, it is possible to have high “Think Ratio”–work that is truly rigorous–but low class participation. As the graph indicates below, the key is to seek both. Lemov writes, “When you seek ratio, you ultimately seek to be high on both axes” (240). 

Teachers, then, should always be engaged in self-diagnosing ratio in their classrooms, asking the questions “How rigorous is the work?” and “How many are participating?”. 

The Content Prerequisite 

Next, Lemov turns to what he calls “The Content Prerequisite” in order to reach the highest levels of ratio. This is the idea that in order for students to engage in rigorous thinking, they need actual mental content, or knowledge, to think about. Lemov acknowledges that in the current educational landscape, the memorization of “mere” factual knowledge is not highly regarded. But he goes on to argue that exercises where students try to “think deeply” without knowing much turns out to be vacuous. “Facts and rigor,” Lemov insists, “are not opposites as some educators continue to suggest, but synergistic partners” (19).

Interestingly, Lemov is not alone on this view. The importance of knowledge acquisition in the learning process is confirmed by the research in Make it Stick: The Science of Successful Learning. In this book, the authors argue that retrieval practice–recalling facts or concepts or events from memory–is crucial for gauging effective learning. In an early chapter of the book, entitled “Learning is Misunderstood,” they point out that creative thinking, a popular phrase in today’s educational world, and increasing knowledge, go hand in hand. Using a building metaphor, the authors write:

Memorizing facts is like stocking a construction site with the supplies to put up the house. Building the house not only requires knowledge of countless different fittings and materials but conceptual knowledge, too…Mastery requires both the possession of ready knowledge and the conceptual understanding of how to use it (18).

In other words, one can’t effectively engage in problem solving, creative thinking, or rigorous analysis without knowing from memory the facts relevant to the topic. It is all too common today to brush off teaching factual knowledge with the quip “I’ll just Google it,” or “That’s what Wikipedia is for.” While it is true that we live in an age in which more information is at our grasp than ever before, it still falls to each individual human learner to sort the information into comprehensible categories. And ironically, to sort information, you need to know information.

(Side note: If you are looking for a great strategy to increase the amount of memory recall in your classroom we recommend checking out Jason’s eBook on the practice of narration.)

The Importance of Knowledge

In her own way, Sayers confirms the importance of the knowledge prerequisite in her lecture. She creatively ascribes the Trivium, the three classical language arts, to three coinciding stages of childhood development. Admitting herself that her views on child psychology are neither “orthodox or enlightened” she defines the work of the grammar (elementary school) stage as memorizing, reciting, chanting, and observing. In short, it is about collecting mental material, or knowledge, that the mind will go to work on in later developmental stages. Sayers writes:

What that material actually is, is only of secondary importance; but it is as well that anything and everything which can usefully be committed to memory should be memorized at this period, whether it is immediately intelligible or not…At this stage, it does not matter nearly so much that these things should be fully understood as that they should be known and remembered. Remember, it is material that we are collecting.

While most classical educators today will disagree with Sayers’ explanation of the Trivium, from a historical standpoint, and critique her understanding of childhood development, let’s not miss her key insight here. It is the same idea that Doug Lemov and the authors of Make it Stick are touching on: knowledge matters. A rigorous education, one in which students are doing the cognitive lifting in a manner that prepares them to learn for themselves, requires the acquisition of knowledge. Where precisely this fits within the liberal arts paradigm is debatable, but the necessity of knowledge, or the content prerequisite, as Lemov calls it, is not.

Building Ratio in the Classroom

Now that we have discussed these preliminary matters, let’s turn to Lemov’s three ways for building ratio and empowering students to do the work of learning: questioning, writing and discussing.

First, teachers build ratio through questioning. When students are asked good questions and expected to give thoughtful answers, they are doing the bulk of the cognitive lifting. They are being asked to explain the concept or make a connection between two ideas. Rather than the teacher lecturing from “on high,” students are engaged in the demanding task of working out knowledge for themselves. Some of the most useful techniques I have found for increasing ratio through questioning are as follows:

• Wait Time: Allow students time to think before answering. If they aren’t productive with that time, narrate them toward being more productive.
• Cold Call: Call on students regardless of whether they’ve raised their hands.
• Break it Down: When a student makes an error, provide just enough help to allow her to solve as much of the original problem as she can.

A second way to build ratio is through writing. As Jordan Peterson shared in a classroom lecture, the best way to teach students to be critical thinkers is to teach them to write. Both the amount and quality of writing students do on a regular basis are key determinants for their ability to think and learn for themselves. Perhaps one of the greatest advantages of writing assignments is that 100% of students are doing the cognitive work, as opposed to one or two when a question is answered orally by one or two students. I have to say, as someone who has been teaching writing for several years now, I actually get a small adrenaline rush when I’ve crafted a well-worded writing prompt and watch every single one of my students go off to the races in fulfilling it. Some key techniques that I’ve found helpful for building ratio through writing include:

• Everybody Writes: Prepare your students to engage rigorously by giving them the chance to reflect in writing before you ask them to discuss.
• Art of the Sentence: Ask students to synthesize a complex idea in a single, well-crafted sentence. The discipline of having to make one sentence do all the work pushes students to use new syntactical forms.
• Build Stamina: Gradually increase writing time to develop in your students the habit of writing productively, and the ability to do it for sustained periods of time.

Building Ratio Through Discussion

A final way Lemov offers teachers to increase ratio in their classrooms is through discussion. He saves this way for last because in some sense it is the most predictable. When students are sitting in a circle and engaged in discussion, there is an (almost) inevitably high degree of ratio going on. In most classical schools, discussion is constantly used pedagogically as a tool for training in the liberal art of dialectic. So the benefits of discussion are well-known and celebrated.

Nevertheless, teachers would do well to remember that not all discussions are created equal. Students simply sitting in a group and restating their opinions at each other, as Lemov notes, does not qualify as a discussion (314). These are merely disconnected verbal interactions. Instead Lemov defines a discussion as “a mutual endeavor by a group of people to develop, refine, or contextualize an idea or set of ideas” (315).

I agree with Lemov’s definition here with one philosophical caveat. It should be clarified that the ideas Lemov is speaking of are not to be understood as mere personal accounts of what people think about the world, whether or not these ideas actually correspond to reality. Rather, a worthy discussion should lead to the discern of objective truth, of the way the world actually is. Thus discussion always has a morally formative and humanizing goal: to expose students to the truth, that they might abide in it, and go on to express it prophetically to others.

Some helpful techniques for building ratio through discussion are as follows:

• Habits of Discussion: Make your discussions more productive and enjoyable by normalizing a set of ground rules or “habits” that allow discussion to be more efficiently cohesive and connected.
• Batch Process: Give more ownership and autonomy to students–particularly when your goal is discussion–by allowing for student discussion without teacher mediation, for short periods of time or for longer, more formal sequences.

Conclusion

In this article, I’ve attempted to demonstrate agreement between the classical principle of self-education and Doug Lemov’s idea of building ratio. When students are expected to do the cognitive lifting in the classroom, they are being prepared to learn for themselves, not just at school, but throughout all of life. Certainly Lemov’s techniques are insufficient for achieving the broader vision of human flourishing from a classical perspective, which entails growth in wisdom and virtue, but nevertheless, his insights for ways teachers can empower their students to learn for themselves are noteworthy. I heartily commend them to you in your broader aim to recover the lost tools of learning in the education of your students. As Sayers implies at the end of her lecture, it would seem that nothing less than the future of western civilization depends on it.

Other articles in this series:

Work, Toil, and the Quest for Academic Rigor

“Teach Like a Champion” for the Classical Classroom, Part 3: Check for Understanding

“Teach Like a Champion” for the Classical Classroom, Part 2: Teacher-Driven Professional Development

“Teach Like a Champion” for the Classical Classroom, Part 1: An Introduction

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Now, to be sure, practice is important, especially if it rises to the threshold of “deliberate practice,” an intensive approach which Patrick lucidly explained in a past article. He himself warns, however, that the repeated rehearsal of skills can be futile if the three other components of deliberate practice are not in play. Patrick writes,

“ We need to be careful with this first component. It is all too easy to set up high frequency and think we are accomplishing something, when in fact all we are doing is a long series of empty work.”

Here it is acknowledged that merely bumping up the frequency of practice is not enough to hone a skill or understand a concept, particularly complex ones that are multifaceted and layered.

Applying this to the classroom, what can be done to ensure that the sort of practice our students engage in is not wasted? From differentiating between direct and indirect objects to solving algebraic equations to writing thoughtful, well-developed essays, how can we train our students in such a way that the skills they develop and knowledge they gain remain in their memories long-term? 

The Myth of Massed Practice

In Make It Stick: The Science of Successful Learning, authors Peter Brown, Henry Roediger, and Mark McDaniel propose that one of the keys for long-term, strong and flexible mastery of a skill or concept is to mix up the practice. But first they dispose of the myth of massed practice. Massed practice is the focused, repetitive practice of one thing at a time until it is mastered (47). To be fair, this approach to learning is fairly intuitive and therefore enjoys quite a bit of trust from onlookers and practitioners alike. For example, the common advice for increasing one’s free-throw percentage in basketball is to shoot over and over again from the fifteen-foot mark (the distance from the free-throw line to the hoop). For those of us with basketball experience, we can even testify to the success of this strategy, specifically how quickly we experienced gains by utilizing this method. 

But real learning, insists the authors of Make It Stick, includes more than how quickly the skill is mastered or knowledge is acquired. What matters even more is whether that skill or knowledge is accessible to our memories when it is needed later:

“The rapid gains produced by massed practice are often evident, but the rapid forgetting is often not” (47).

The litmus test for successfully learning a skill, then, is whether this practical knowledge remains in our memory long-term. Scientists call the increased performance during the acquisition phase of a skill “momentary strength” and distinguish it from “underlying habit strength” (63). 

I have experienced this distinction between momentary strength and underlying habit strength too often in my ongoing development as a handyman. Thanks to the internet, when something in my house needs fixing or replacing, I need only search for the relevant video online to find out how to solve the problem. After watching the video (ten times over) and then completing the job myself, I gained momentary strength in the skill. I walked away from the project feeling confidently handy. However, three months later, when the same problem returned, I discovered that in the previous experience I had not actually gained underlying habit strength. As I scanned my memory for knowledge and proficiency of the skill, the search results were clear: no records found. (Note: I suppose I am exaggerating. My memory could recall some bits and pieces of what I had learned previously. But it wasn’t nearly sufficient for what I need to fix the problem again. Too much had been lost.)

Why? I had used massed practice, developing momentary strength, but not underlying habit strength that would serve me well long-term. I watched the video, spent a focused, inordinate amount of time honing the skill, and then neglected to practice it for three-months. Over this duration of time, the practical knowledge I gained was lost. It faded away into the distance, along with other short-term memories, like what I wore to work that day or what I had for breakfast.

So failing to gain long-term retention is one problem with massed practice, but even worse, this approach to learning, according to researchers, generally leads to inflexible, surface-level comprehension that is not amenable for complex cognitive acts like differentiation and application. In other words, it doesn’t lead to true mastery. 

Three Ways to Mix it Up

In order to reach this level of true mastery, mixing up the practice is the way to go. And, according to the latest research, there are three main ways to do so: 

1. Spaced Practice: Instead of intensively focusing on one skill for a single, extended session, space out the practice into multiple sessions. Work on it for a while and then return to it the next day or week. The space allotted between each session allows for the knowledge of the skill to soak into one’s long-term memory and connect to prior knowledge. Revisiting the skill each session certainly takes more effort, but that’s the point:

“The increased effort required to retrieve the learning after a little forgetting has the effect of retriggering consolidation, further strengthening memory” (49).

2. Interleaved Practice: While we experience the quickest gains by focusing on one specific skill or subset of knowledge over a period of time (momentary strength), interleaving, or mixing up the skill or concept you are focusing on in a practice session, leads to stronger understanding and retention (underlying habit strength). It feels sluggish and frustrating at times, for both teachers and students mind you, because it involves moving from skill to skill before full mastery is attained, but it leads to both a depth and durability of knowledge that massed practice does not (50).

3. Varied Practice: Varying practice entails constantly changing up the situation or conditions in which the skill or concept is being applied. It therefore strengthens the ability to transfer learning from one situation and apply it to another, requiring the student to constantly be assessing context and bridging concepts. Because this jump from concept to concept triggers different parts of the brain, it is more cognitively challenging, and therefore encodes the learning “…in a more flexible representation that can be applied more broadly” (52).

Test Case: Mixed Practice in Math Class

Let’s apply this concept of mixed practice to math class. The teacher is explaining to her students how to calculate the volume of geometric figures. The “massed practice” approach would have her teach the formula for calculating the volume of, say, a cube and then release her students to find the volume for ten different sized cubes. By the end of the class period, the majority of her students would be comfortable performing the algorithm, thereby demonstrating ostensible mastery of the skill (at least in the short-term).

Contrast this scenario with the “mixed practice” approach. The teacher might start by teaching the formula for the volume of a cube and then giving her students a couple practice problems to solve. But soon after, she would teach a different formula, say, the formula for finding the volume of a cylinder and, after that, a sphere. Upon giving her students a couple practice problems for each type of figure, she would instruct her students to complete a set of problems, in which various volume problems are interleaved. This problem set would force students to practice discernment: identify the particular figure, recall the relevant algorithm, and then run the numbers. Periodically, over the following days and weeks, the teacher would include various volume problems in the class warm-up and in the daily homework as well as other concepts previously covered.

As you can see from this example from math class, when mixed practice is implemented, underlying habit strength is forged. The order and types of exercises don’t permit a student to fall into mindless, rote practice. Instead, each problem requires higher level thinking skills beyond memorization such as categorization and application. In order to gain true mastery, the research is clear: mix up the practice. 

Mixed Practice and the Liberal Arts

Let me leave readers with one final thought: I’ve been using the modern phrase “true mastery” as shorthand for the sort of breadth and depth of learning we are aiming for at our schools and in our homes. But I could just as easily describe this outcome using language from the liberal arts tradition. When students engage in the challenge and rigor of mixed practice, they are being trained to learn and think for themselves, to engage in a form of self-education, which is a central idea in the classical tradition (as Jason explained so eloquently in his recent article for Circe). Their tools of learning, the liberal arts, are being sharpened, so to speak.

In addition, by providing opportunities for our students to engage in mixed practice, we avoid teaching them bad habits of cramming, that is, surface-level mastery for brief demonstration on an upcoming test. Instead we give them an opportunity to perform dynamic and valuable work, stretching their minds in flexibility, durability, and discernment, all of which is befitting of their God-given intellects and capabilities.

This is the sort of learning I get excited about and hopefully through this blog more parents and teachers can join us at Educational Renaissance in this life-giving work. 

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