In my previous two articles I framed my discussion of the history of narration with the controversy between Charlotte Mason and classical Christian education advocates. I suggested that narration’s history may be a fact that puts to rest the false dichotomies of either side. While Charlotte Mason did claim discovery of certain principles related to the nature of mind, narration itself is one of the many things she owes to the tradition. As she said of her philosophy and methods, “Some of it is new, much of it is old.” (Toward a Philosophy of Education; Wilder, 2008; 29)
As we saw, narration has its roots in the classical era with rhetorical teachers like Aelius Theon and Quintilian, where its goals included the development of memory, fluency and style for future orators. It was particularly powerful as a practice because it fused the natural oral story-telling of pre-literate cultures with the refinements of classical Greek and Roman rhetoric. Before moving to the rebirth of narration in the Renaissance and early modern era, I have to admit to an unfortunate gap in my own knowledge.
I cannot claim to know that narration was absent from medieval pedagogy. In fact, I suspect that it was not. But I have not (as yet) found any direct evidence of it. There are undoubtedly more places to look than I have had the opportunity of doing so to date. So I would encourage any interested readers to keep an eye out and let me know if you find mention of any narration-like practices occurring in the Middle Ages. However, for the purposes of this series I will have to temporarily conclude that, like much of the tradition of classical rhetoric, narration went into dormancy during the Middle Ages.
After all, the political situation changed drastically after the fall of Rome, and as a result rhetoric training itself underwent a shift. Without democratic political bodies to convince of a particular course of action, ceremonial and legal rhetoric predominated and crystalized into a more literate and scholastic form. As George A. Kennedy, a leading rhetorical scholar, put it:
“With the end of orderly civic and economic life not only did public support of education disappear, but the reasons for rhetorical education in its traditional form declined. Fewer councils remained in which an orator could speak, and legal procedures were disrupted; on the other hand, barbarian kings easily acquired a taste for being extolled in Latin prose or verse, even if they did not understand what was being said.” (Classical Rhetoric and Its Christian and Secular Tradition, 2nd ed.; Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999; 196)
The golden age of oratory had passed. It was no wonder that grammatical training predominated, followed by the refined logic of scholasticism. And likewise, it is no wonder that, when the tides turned toward the Renaissance and a return ad fontes (“to the sources”), back to the rhetoric of the classical era, that we would see narration reborn as well.
Narration’s Rebirth, Stage 1: Desiderius Erasmus (1466-1536)
I owe to Karen Glass my awareness of the first two stages in narration’s rebirth: Erasmus and Comenius (see Know and Tell: The Art of Narration, p. 16). However, the context of Desiderius Erasmus’ work is enlightening, because it illustrates just how indebted he was to the grammatical and rhetorical tradition. The chapter leading up to his mention of narration reads like a passage out of Quintilian. In fact, Erasmus himself references his dependence on Quintilian, saying,
“As regards the methods of the rudiments—that is, of learning to talk and knowing the alphabet—I can add nothing to what Quintilian has laid down.”
Desiderius Erasmus, Concerning the Aim and Method of Education, translated by William Harrison Woodward (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1904), p. 168
Erasmus affirms the value of teaching students to speak both Latin and Greek as the main sources of all the important knowledge then available. Then he gives instructions for exercises in composition, followed by how the teacher should guide students through reading classic texts. His composition exercises are based on the classical principle of imitation: “The Master in the course of his reading will be careful to note instances which present themselves as models suitable for imitation” (170). He then recommends the more challenging exercises of Quintilian, like “paraphrasing poetry into prose and the reverse process” (171).
While we judged this exercise of Quintilian’s to be an extension of narration, in which the student would write a paraphrase from memory rather than with constant reference to a text, it is almost certain that this is not the case for Erasmus’ recommendations. One clue comes in his recommendations for translating from Greek into Latin and vice versa in the same section—what Walter Ong might call an art of high literacy and one which almost certainly relies on being able to reference the text itself (see Erasmus, Aim and Method of Education, 171-172).
Given the invention of the printing press before Erasmus’ lifetime, highly increasing availability of texts, we are probably right to assume that the educational situation of Erasmus’ day was quite different from the Roman era. Narration of texts from the teacher’s single reading would have become more counterintuitive because texts were cheaper and more accessible. Why would one narrate merely the text itself when it is there at hand?
We might bemoan this fact as the fulfillment of Plato’s dire predictions in the Phaedrus (see the final section of the previous article). However, the challenging composition exercises that Erasmus proposes would have probably compensated for the loss. And this isn’t even to mention how Erasmus himself transformed narration into a practice for assimilating the teacher’s lecture in a passage that out-flanks Plato’s objection:
“The master must not omit to set as an exercise the reproduction of what he has given to the class. It involves time and trouble to the teacher, I know well, but it is essential. A literal reproduction of the matter taught is, of course, not required, but the substance of it presented in the pupil’s own way. Personally I disapprove of the practice of taking down a lecture just as it is delivered. For this prevents reliance upon memory which should, as time goes on, need less and less of that external aid which note-taking supplies.”
Erasmus, Aim and Method of Education,177-178.
Here we can see narration endorsed as “essential” in the case of the teacher’s lecture, rather than with texts. Of course, we have to remember that Erasmus has already discussed imitative composition exercises on topics taken from the classic texts that the students would read. So it is not as though there would be no opportunity for students to assimilate the subject matter of texts through their own writing.
What may be more surprising is Erasmus’ stance against note-taking during the teacher’s lectures and in favor of narration. His reasoning involves the training of the memory and the reduction of an “external aid” over the course of a student’s education. For Erasmus “note-taking” is a crutch, or better yet, corresponds to the use of training wheels for the memory. They should be taken off as soon as possible.
Narration, then, in the first stage of its rebirth, has shifted its focus from the text read aloud to the spoken lecture on the text. In a similar fashion, the training of a student’s rhetorical style has been almost entirely subsumed in the training of the memory for content (note “the substance of it presented in the pupil’s own way”), and the narration is most likely a written enterprise, since it causes “time and trouble to the teacher,” most likely because of the extra work involved in reading and assessing the students’ narrations.
Narration’s Rebirth, Stage 2: John Amos Comenius (1592-1670)
The great Czech educational reformer, philosopher, pastor and theologian, John Amos Comenius, sometimes called the father of modern education, represents the next stage in the history of narration. The opening statement of his stunning work on the philosophy of education Didactica Magna or The Great Didactic promises much in terms that are familiar to advocates of narration:
“Let the main object of this, our Didactic, be as follows : To seek and to find a method of instruction, by which teachers may teach less, but learners may learn more; by which schools may be the scene of less noise, aversion, and useless labour, but of more leisure, enjoyment, and solid progress ; and through which the Christian community may have less darkness, perplexity, and dissension, but on the other hand more light, orderliness, peace, and rest.”
John Amos Comenius, preface to The Great Didactic
Charlotte Mason found in narration an ideal “method” for attaining Comenius’ golden key of education: teachers teaching less and learners learning more. Of course, the extent to which Comenius anticipated Charlotte Mason, or Mason followed Comenius, is an area ripe for more study, at least for me.
My Head of School Dave Seibel and I are planning to read Comenius’ Great Didactic together starting this January to see what we will make of it. Classical Academic Press also has a short introduction to Comenius in their Giants in the History of Education series, which I plan to purchase and read as well. But I already know from Karen Glass that Comenius recommended that “every pupil should acquire the habit of acting as a teacher. This will happen if, after the teacher has fully demonstrated and expounded something, the pupil himself is immediately required to give a satisfactory demonstration and exposition of the same thing in the same manner” (as qtd in Glass, Know and Tell, 16). Glass quotes from another of Comenius’ works The Analytical Didactic (trans. Vladimir Jelinek; Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1953; 193), in which Comenius “reinterpreted the principle of nature that he had described in The Great Didactic as a principle of logic” (John E. Sadler, “John Amos Comenius” in Encyclopedia Britannica; accessed January, 2021).
As stated, Comenius’ variant on narration embodies the golden key of his Great Didactic by turning the student into the teacher after a teacher’s “demonstration” or “exposition”. It thus follows Erasmus in focusing on a spoken lecture or explanation by the teacher rather than a text. The new development present in Comenius is to emphasize the ironic transformation of student into teacher. Chris Perrin of Classical Academic Press has referred to this pedagogical idea as the classical principle Docendo Discimus (“By teaching we learn”) in his course Introduction to Classical Education. (I wonder where Perrin himself derived this Latin phrase from…. Was it from Comenius or an earlier thinker in the tradition? Or is it a phrase he himself quipped to represent a traditional conception?) Similarly, I have often referred to the classical principle of self-education, citing Charlotte Mason’s quip that there is no education but self-education and Dorothy Sayers’s remarks about students learning how to learn in “The Lost Tools of Learning”.
I am confident that more remains to be said on Comenius and narration, but I have not as yet been able to procure the rarer work that Karen Glass quoted from (though a used copy is now in my Amazon shopping cart). However, for now we can conclude that in Comenius’ hands narration of the teacher’s lecture became the mechanism for learners learning more and teachers teaching less. The narration most likely occurred orally, given the internal logic of the student becoming the teacher, but we cannot be sure without looking closer at the context.
Narration’s Rebirth, Stage 3: John Locke (1632-1704)
John Locke represents a final and perhaps unconnected stage in narration’s rebirth. To suppose that he did not engage with either his partial contemporary Comenius, or with the famous Erasmus, would probably be going too far. But his early modern Enlightenment philosophy no doubt registered itself in his treatise, Some Thoughts Concerning Education (Hackett, 1996; orig. published 1693). I have already expressed my view elsewhere that he, like Erasmus, was directly dependent on Quintilian (see the author’s A Classical Guide to Narration; CiRCE, 2020; p. 96, n. 122). So his recommendations on the topic are best categorized as a part of narration’s renaissance or rebirth.
For Locke narration is the solution to a problem with the “classical” education of his day. He begins his section on rhetoric and logic with a defense for speaking so little of them up to this point in his treatise:
“The reason is because of the little advantage young people receive by them. For I have seldom or never observed anyone to get the skill of reasoning well or speaking handsomely by studying those rules which pretend to teach it; and therefore I would have a young gentleman take a view of them in the shortest systems [that] could be found without dwelling long on the contemplation and study of those formalities. Right reasoning is founded on something else than the predicaments and predicables, and does not consist in talking in mode and figure itself.” (140)
In objecting to “rules” rather than practice, Locke continues a theme that he has already established in the book about training young children by habit rather than memorized rules. In A Classical Guide to Narration I pointed out that this error of the “classical” training of Locke’s day amounts to a misunderstanding of the classical distinction between an art and a science:
“The rhetoric teachers of Locke’s day had been treating the art of rhetoric as if it were a science that could be mastered through acquiring knowledge about the art: various names of figures of speech and rules for types of speeches. But without the facility with with language based in practice and cultivated habits, all of it was useless! (A Classical Guide to Narration, 96)
Of course, this antagonism toward logic and rhetoric might make John Locke seem anti-classical in his philosophy of education. But this would be a misunderstanding. Locke is simply endorsing the renaissance humanist stream of classical education over the encrusted scholasticism of the late medieval era. He was refocusing attention on the great authors of the past (ad fontes) and on imitation of worthy models. As he goes on to say,
“If you would have your son reason well, let him read Chillingworth [an Oxford scholar and churchman, who was a skillful debater, mathematician and theologian]; and if you would have him speak well, let him be conversant in Tully [Marcus Tullius Cicero, the great Roman orator and statesman] to give him the true idea of eloquence, and let him read those things that are well written in English to perfect his style in the purity of our language.” (140)
Developing the arts of reasoning and eloquence, for Locke, come by reading the right authors to provide ideas and models of proper thought and speech. But it also comes by practice, as he says later:
“They have been taught rhetoric but yet never taught how to express themselves handsomely with their tongues or pens in the language they are always to use: as if the names of the figures that embellished the discourses of those who understood the art of speaking were the very art and skill of speaking well. This, as all other things of practice, is to be learned not by a few, or a great many rules given, but by exercise and application according to good rules, or rather patterns, till habits are got and a facility of doing it well.” (141)
Locke’s point accords well with the modern research on elite performance that Anders Erikson and others have brought to light in delineating the value of deliberate practice (as well as near proxies like purposeful practice) for acquiring high level skill. The arts are complex skills and are best trained through coached practice, not mere comprehension of concepts, however true and inspiring.
Locke’s narration recommendations remarkably embody the principles of effective practice, including the importance of critical feedback, specific focused efforts on improving one aspect of performance at a time, and systematic development of mental models. The entire passage is worth sharing here:
“Agreeable hereunto, perhaps it might not be amiss to make children, as soon as they are capable of it, often to tell a story of anything they know, and to correct at first the most remarkable fault they are guilty of in their way of putting it together. When that fault is cured, then to show them the next, and so on, till one after another all, at least the gross ones, are mended. When they can tell tales pretty well, then it may be time to make them write them. The Fables of Aesop, the only book almost that I know fit for children, may afford them matter for this exercise of writing English, as well as for reading and translating to enter them in the Latin tongue. When they are got past the faults of grammar and can join in a continued coherent discourse the several parts of a story without bald and unhandsome forms of transition (as is usual) often repeated, he that desires to perfect them yet farther in this, which is the first step to speaking well and needs no invention, may have recourse to Tully and, by putting in practice those rules which that master of eloquence gives in his First Book De Inventione §20, make them know wherein the skill and graces of a handsome narrative, according to the several subjects and designs of it, lie.” (141-142)
Like Quintilian, Locke begins with young children telling stories, though he is content for them to tell “anything they know” at first, as the tutor or parent simply plays the role of coach: correcting one fault at a time, as the child practices telling again and again. Instead of focusing narration on the content to be learned, like Erasmus and Comenius, Locke has brought into sharp relief the skill of story-telling and the fluency of speaking gained thereby. While he does recommend Aesop’s fables, like Quintilian, the shift to written narrations form the main focus, and fixing the student’s “faults of grammar” and “bald and unhandsome forms of transition” is his main concern.
In essence, Locke has restored narration as the foundation stone of rhetorical training, rather than as a method for learning content in any subject. Narration is, for him, the backbone of an English gentleman’s practical skill in speaking and writing that will equip him for the duties of his life. Daily practice in imitating classic authors and especially in learning to write letters (“The writing of letters has so much to do in all the occurrences of human life that no gentleman can avoid showing himself in this kind of writing.”) form the bedrock requirements for his education (142).
Readers who are familiar with Charlotte Mason’s practice of narration alone may be surprised by some of these different applications of narration. Whether it’s narrating from a teacher’s lecture, or correcting the faults in a student’s narration with a focus on skill rather than content, narration’s rebirth through Erasmus, Comenius and Locke defies the standard assumptions of Charlotte Mason’s practice of it. After all, Charlotte Mason seems to almost exclusively envision students narrating from texts without stylistic corrections but a primary focus on content.
In the next and final article in this series, we’ll compare Charlotte Mason’s pedagogy of narration with its classical roots and its renaissance rebirth. Our aim will be to distill some further conclusions for educators today, both practically in terms of how we should use narration in our 21st century context, but also philosophically in what this all means for the classical Christian education and Charlotte Mason movements today.
Other articles in this series:
Part 1: Charlotte Mason’s Discovery?
Part 4: Charlotte Mason’s Practice of Narration in Historical Perspective