I’ve decided to put the series on Bloom’s Taxonomy vs. Aristotle’s Intellectual Virtues on hold for a couple months after contracting with Classical Academic Press to film two courses in December for ClassicalU: one on narration and another on Charlotte Mason’s philosophy for classical educators. So I’m returning to the topic of narration and Charlotte Mason to help me deliberately prepare. (By the way, if you have suggestions for what topics you’d like to see tackled or questions you’d like answered in either of these courses, email us at educationalrenaissanceblog@gmail.com!)
It’s been some time since I’ve written explicitly on narration for Educational Renaissance. The last article that addressed it directly (Narration as Flow) came shortly after launching the popular eBook “How to Implement Narration in the Classical Classroom” that I recently retired because of incorporating it into a larger book. (Don’t worry! I replaced it with a similar resource “Charlotte Mason and the Trivium: Planning Lessons with Narration”.) But that doesn’t mean the teaching tool of narration has been off my mind since.
Narration on My Mind
Last winter I did most of the leg work in terms of research and writing to get my book A Classical Guide to Narration (forthcoming with the CiRCE Institute) into the right place for the editorial process. Lugging that stack of books home for nights and weekends, I plugged away while watching the kids as my wife taught voice lessons. I didn’t know I could write while monitoring a toddler and a baby… but after all necessity is the mother of invention. Then during the discussions last spring that led me to take a new position as Principal at Coram Deo Academy, narration was my one non-negotiable. If I came, Coram Deo would be implementing narration.
Over the summer I had the opportunity to share about narration at several conferences: the Association of Classical Christian Schools, the Society for Classical Learning, the University Model Schools International, the CiRCE Institute, and the Charlotte Mason Family Camp. Lastly, as the school year got started, I trained my own faculty in the practice of narration, as well as the Ecclesial Schools Initiative by Zoom. I even had the opportunity to share narration with Asian Christian educators as part of a team-taught virtual course on poetic knowledge led by Ravi Jain. That all might sound exhausting, but for me it was exhilarating, not least because of the chance to share about a practice that really matters to me and is life-changing for children.
All this is to say that narration has been on my mind quite a lot as I’ve first researched then rehearsed material from the book in presentations. One of the most interesting and significant discoveries that I made in my research about narration is its history before Charlotte Mason in the grammatical and rhetorical tradition. Since my first hints at this fact years ago while reading John Locke and Quintilian, I’ve been fascinated by earlier educators’ endorsement of practices very like Mason’s narration.
But I think this history is especially significant for two movements today: the Charlotte Mason movement and the classical Christian education movement. You can see why. If narration has a history in the liberal arts tradition, then it makes it hard for either Masonites or CCE leaders to claim that never the twain shall meet.
Charlotte Mason vs. Classical Christian Education?
For instance, Art Middlekauff of Charlotte Mason Poetry has claimed that Charlotte Mason did not “look to the classical tradition to guide her theory” but instead “looked to the Gospels, science and her observations of children.” While containing a grain of truth, this claim ends up being a simplistic reduction of Mason. It would be more accurate to say that Mason regularly makes rhetorical appeal to advancing science (as a good Victorian British Christian might be expected to). But by science, it’s also worth wondering whether this is necessarily against the classical tradition. After all, science itself is a term and sphere dependent on the tradition of the liberal arts and sciences.
Also, Art Middlekauff has picked his evidence with care and neglected Charlotte Mason’s own references to classical philosophers of education as authoritative, as well as her refutation of new educational thinkers on the basis of the principles of the liberal arts tradition. While she does claim some newness for her methods—as many classical educators have over the course of the tradition, by the way… the liberal arts tradition has never been opposed to innovation—she is also happy to confess her reliance on tradition.
As she says explicitly of her educational theory in the first chapter of her final book Towards a Philosophy of Education,
I have attempted to unfold (in various volumes) a system of educational theory which seems to me able to meet any rational demand, even that severest criterion set by Plato; it is able to “run the gauntlet of objections, and is ready to disprove them, not by appeals to opinion, but to absolute truth.” Some of it is new, much of it is old.
(2008 Wilder, 28-29; emphasis added)
This hardly sounds like an extreme modernist who opposes engaging with educational theorists of the past in favor of the new science. The very fact that she quotes from Plato belies such an assumption. Moreover, the implication of her wording is that more of her theory is old than it is new (“some” is less than “much”).
Opposing Charlotte Mason and the classical tradition in this way also presents us with a false dichotomy that is unfortunately present in the thinking of both some Masonites and some classical Christian educators: either we must look to the past or we look to modern research and methods. In an educational landscape obsessed with scientism, it is no wonder that the classical education movement has taken a hard turn toward historical theories and methods. Mason had much less pushing her to such an extreme, and, in fact, with the tide just beginning to ebb out toward the new depths of scientific discovery about the brain, psychology and the nature of habit formation, she had to make an appeal that garnered the attention of a very different crowd.
Given the differences of time and place, the fact that Mason’s rhetoric differs from the modern classical education movement is not at all surprising. But this should not confine Masonites and classical Christian educators to separate camps and antagonism, especially given the amount of essential agreement between them. Besides, the opposition of Charlotte Mason and the classical tradition makes little sense; they are such different things! Unless we think of the classical tradition as some monolithic, unified theory and practice of education, opposing a single thinker to it is a strange notion. We could just as easily set up Plato, or Aristotle, Quintilian, Augustine, Aquinas, Luther, Melanchton, Bacon, Locke or Comenius to it. There is always a gap between any individual educational thinker and the tradition as a whole (if one can even view it that way); otherwise, they would be mere parrots. Sometimes this gap represents a departure from a core value, but other times it represents a fruitful development from within. Such a question cannot be solved by simplistic dichotomies.
More important perhaps is the gap between movements that should be allies. Educational Renaissance exists, in a way, to bridge this gap, not only between Charlotte Mason and the classical tradition, but between new and old educational theory in general… between the insights of ancient wisdom and the legitimate advances of modern research. The real glory is in an appropriate synthesis of seemingly opposite ideas and data, as no less revered a figure than Thomas Aquinas revealed in his own dialectical method.
Charlotte Mason’s Claim of Discovery
Narration is a test case of this broader claim for Charlotte Mason and the classical tradition. While some will still want to emphasize the disagreement and opposition, narration tells a different story. And that is because narration is a teaching practice that Charlotte Mason adapted from the rhetorical tradition.
But if this is the case, as I contend in my forthcoming book, then what of Charlotte Mason’s own claims about discovering narration? I know very well that she nowhere cites any explicit classical sources for the practice, like John Locke (her likely source based on similarities in language and detail in Home Education) or his source Quintilian. On the other hand, she does confess in her final volume that she “was reading a good deal of philosophy and ‘Education’ at the time.” And she does cite Plato’s conception of the forms or ideas for support of the mind needing proper sustenance (see Towards a Philosophy of Education, Introduction, Wilder: 18). This is one of many instances that at least puts the lie to the claim that she doesn’t draw her philosophy from the tradition; in fact, whether or not she draws from it as a source for her theory, she often feels the need to justify it in the philosophical terms of the classical tradition.
But of course, she does also mention her observation of children and general reading, as stepping stones on her journey of discovery:
It is difficult to explain how I came to a solution of a puzzling problem,—how to secure attention. Much observation of children, various incidents from one’s general reading, the recollection of my own childhood and the consideration of my present habits of mind brought me to the recognition of certain laws of the mind, by working in accordance with which the steady attention of children of any age and any class in society is insured, week-in, week out,—attention, not affected by distracting circumstances. (20)
While this may seem like a claim that she derived the details of narration from observation and her own philosophical reflection, instead we should see it as an account of how she came to the principles that undergird the practice of narration. (I’m reading Karen Glass’ In Vital Harmony now and am definitely enjoying it.) For Charlotte Mason the practice of narration had to have a number of attendant circumstances for it to work optimally: a rich text, a single reading, a moral impulse in the students, etc. The practice of narration becomes a valuable and global tool of learning when embodied in the right atmosphere, as a means of training in the habit of attention, and through the natural curiosity of the mind feeding on living ideas.
Narration itself is a common and simple enough exercise that it was used here or there, in rhetorical training, as far back as we have record. It was the principles of the child’s personhood and the nature of mind that she claimed to have discovered and applied more uniformly to the how, when and what of narration. As she remarks later in the introduction to her final volume,
The reader will say with truth,—”I knew all this before and have always acted more or less on these principles”; and I can only point to the unusual results we obtain through adhering not ‘more or less,’ but strictly to the principles and practices I have indicated. (24)
This account from Charlotte Mason herself seems to answer the charge that she claimed to have “discovered” narration, and so it cannot be derived from the classical tradition.
As we’ll see in the next article, there are a variety of earlier sources that detail the regular use of narration in a manner very like what Charlotte Mason recommended. There are even two of her contemporaries across the Atlantic, rhetoric professors in America, who recommend narration-like exercises in their rhetoric and composition textbook for use in secondary schools.
Of course, none of these earlier examples call for exactly what Charlotte Mason recommends, but in a way that would have been impossible. Only at Charlotte Mason’s time in England were a wealth of books finally cheap enough and widely available enough for the sort of book-based education she envisioned. The mass publication and commercialization of books in Victorian England was, arguably, a necessary ingredient in the history of narration entering its final stage with Charlotte Mason’s ‘liberal education for all’ movement.
But more on that next time after we walk through the various stages in the history of narration, as best as I have been able to piece them together so far.
Later articles in this series:
Part 4: Charlotte Mason’s Practice of Narration in Historical Perspective
My eyes were opened to much of what you are saying after reading “Consider This” by Karen Glass. She shows the harmony of true classical education and Charlotte Mason’s ideas. Thank you for your insight and research! Is there any way to access the video teaching on poetic knowledge? I’m interested in that topic, thanks!
Caroline, I couldn’t agree more. I was excited to find many of my own inclinations and thoughts mirrored in Consider This as well a number of years ago. Unfortunately, we don’t have an accessible or sharable recording on Poetic Knowledge and narration, but on the training and consulting page you can get free access to a similar talk on Cultivating Wonder (rather than poetic knowledge) through narration. I do look forward to making some connections to poetic knowledge in my series on Aristotle’s five intellectual virtues (because I think the virtues of intuition and artistry round out the educational project well). Hope that helps! Thanks for your comment!