In my last article I shared the first piece of why the history of narration matters: it has the potential to break down the barrier between the Charlotte Mason community and classical educators. There are some notable exceptions who have tried to cross the aisle, but for the most part these two groups have kept to their own camps — some have even had cutting critiques of the other side to share. And of course, we may be each other’s best critics in a way that would be good for both of us. But for that to happen Masonites would need to interact with the broader classical tradition and classical educators would need to actually read and engage with Charlotte Mason.
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 4: Charlotte Mason’s Practice of Narration in Historical Perspective
