Narrative Minds, Webwork Worlds
Charlotte Mason and the Art of Storytelling
I’ve been reading the works of Charlotte Mason lately, and a lot of thoughts are percolating in my brain. I haven’t talked much about education here, but as a mom with small children (as well as a writer committed to lifelong learning), I think about it often. Mason, a turn-of-the-century English educator, embraces the sort of holistic (non-reductive) thinking that is also present in the works of Wendell Berry and Jane Jacobs. These thinkers are deeply dedicated to the idea that our world is interconnected and rich with meaning. They suggest that this world presents a calling to both hope and care. Berry traces these things in a rural setting; Jacobs in an urban one. Mason traces it in the lives of children and in their educational atmospheres. (Ivan Illich, N. Scott Momaday, and Robin Wall Kimmerer also come to mind as key thinkers who explore and emphasize these themes.)
Charlotte Mason was a teacher and philosopher on the subject of education. She worked in the United Kingdom from the late 19th century up until World War I (she died in 1923). Her work is remarkable in many ways. But the aspect of her books (particularly The Philosophy of Education) that has struck me most of late is her suggestion that “education is a life.” With that statement, she refuses to partition, reduce, or dissect the work of learning. Rather, she suggests that education is a tapestry, an indivisible whole—one that ideally saturates every facet of our existence. Education itself doesn’t just happen in a classroom. It soaks through every part of life, whether we’re intentionally learning or not. (This is something the Christian author James K.A. Smith also explores in his book You Are What You Love. There, he suggests that we absorb and learn intuitive “liturgies” in everyday habits and practices. These subconscious liturgies shape our habits, beliefs, and loves. So we need to pay attention to them.)
This has a few practical consequences. First, it means that everyday life is a classroom, and we should pay attention to what we’re teaching. We are learning as we clean, hike, read, watch television, bake, and talk over dinner. The moments when our brains are supposedly resting, and learning is not the priority, are deeply pedagogical moments. Children’s play is learning (in fact, play is one of the most life-shaping experiences a child will have). Cooking dinner is a multi-sensory educational moment. The way we talk to our children when they are struggling, throwing a fit, or tired and angry—the gentleness or the frustration we bring to those moments—form their minds and future habits.
But there’s a second conclusion that Mason comes to that is equally fascinating and important. Rather than asking children to dissect a text in order to demonstrate their mastery of a lesson—having them regurgitate a bunch of dates and names from a history textbook, for instance—Mason suggested that we should train them to narrate back these texts. In narration, students have to tell back the whole story (as much of it as they can) in their own words. Narrations require deep attention. The student has to have read or listened well. But they also require ingenuity and creativity: in retelling the lesson, it becomes their own.
What Mason recognized is that kids “narrate” in everyday life, all the time. Whenever they finish a favorite novel or television episode, they run to their parents and walk them through the entire story, piece by piece. “This happened, and then this happened, and then this… and then you’ll never guess what happened next!” Perhaps this is familiar to you. I remember doing this to my mom all the time. I would pace back and forth in the kitchen, giving her a play-by-play of every book I read. Mason suggests that children are, in fact, incredible storytellers—and that most classrooms accidentally train this skill out of children, rather than teaching them how to incorporate that talent into every subject and every discipline. Most students are required to pull specific, teacher-identified ideas out of a novel (“What are the three most important plot devices in A Tale of Two Cities?”). They don’t get the opportunity to write, to remember, and to pay attention by cultivating their own storytelling capabilities. Their classroom learning can end up feeling disjointed, fragmented, and even objectifying. They aren’t getting to use their own imaginations or creativity; they aren’t being encouraged to pick out their own details, to tell their own story; and they’re encouraged to think in parts, rather than in a whole.
I was thinking about the importance of narration as I prepared for my interview with Dr. Norman Wirzba a few weeks ago. So much of Dr. Wirzba’s work emphasizes the importance of webworks and ecosystems: the idea that we as human beings are each unique yet also inextricably interrelated. We are interdependent beings woven into a “meshwork” (a concept from the anthropologist Tim Ingold) that both transcends and infuses us. An education that seeks to foster narration rather than dissection, I would suggest, teaches children from a very young age to think in webworks rather than in fragmented pieces. It encourages them to always be thinking about the interconnectedness of things: to synthesize and marvel, rather than to objectify and dissect. (Even when talking about machines, you have to have a good knowledge of the whole—the entire car, and how it works—before you can then begin to label, pick apart, and study the various pieces—in this case, looking under the hood and taking apart the engine.)
I think we need to cultivate a “lively” education in both ways: both by emphasizing education outside the classroom, and by encouraging children—and ourselves—to be holistic storytellers. The pieces and parts of the story matter, of course. Students should be able to identify causes, ingredients, solutions, and the like. But without first developing an understanding of the overarching story, the way each piece weaves together, will we ever understand the parts well?
This applies to agricultural study and conservation, as well: agriculture has become a sickened and exploitative endeavor insofar as it has embraced the dissection of land, ecosystems, and communities for personal gain. We’ve urged farmers to mono-crop, specialize, and reduce. We have not emphasized or realized the interconnectedness of things: from insects to birds, birds to cattle, cattle to soil, and back again. We’ve isolated, cordoned off, sprayed, fertilized, and plowed away the health that only exists in webworks.
What I find interesting about the regenerative agriculture movement is that it is, in many ways, a call to narration. It is a call to attentive storytelling on a massive scale. It forces both farmer and consumer to take in a whole, rather than its parts. It urges us to look carefully at earthworms and butterflies and meadowlarks, all the types of grasses and wildflowers in a pasture, barn owls and bats, chickens and pigs and cattle.
What happens if we learn again to narrate, to tell back, what we see? What we’ve learned? To marvel in it, and in that marveling, to educate others?
Not all of us are farmers. But feeding our narrative minds helps us to pay attention in the ways that count, regardless of our calling and context. Maybe it means forming a book club this winter, and thinking more deeply about the webwork of narratives that make us who we are. Maybe it means practicing fractions by making lemon drizzle cake. Or learning about fungi through hikes and nature journaling, mushroom quiche and backyard experiments.
Regardless, it is a work worth doing—a move toward wholeness, and away from fragmentation. If Mason is right, then education should be a lifelong feast for the mind and soul. Why not embrace that feast, right here and now?
How does narrative shape your day to day? How could you embrace those stories?
Do you see “education” happening in the everyday—for you, or for others in your life?
Share your thoughts in the comments!
essays + news
Peter Blair considers curiosity, studiousness, and our relationships with the world: “When Augustine distinguishes curiosity from studiousness in On the Trinity, he remarks that the studious mind loves what it knows ‘on account of which it wishes to know what it does not know,’ while the curious person ‘is more fitly said to hate things he knows not, of which he wishes that there should be none, in wishing to know everything.’ We must interact with the world as studious people, not as curious people—that is, as people who love the world, not as people who hate it.”
Beautiful meditation from Michael Sacasas on “receiving the day”: “To experience the gradual arrival of the day in this way—to learn what it means to receive the day—is also to receive another, seemingly paradoxical gift: the gift of a beginning and the possibilities that come with it. Night buried yesterday. Now we rise to something new.”
An introduction to the stunning artworks—and life—of Dorothea Lange, from the National Gallery of Art (source for this newsletter’s artworks).
Revisiting this lovely piece by Leah Libresco Sargeant: “The livelier the gift economy we create, the more spendthrift we are free to be. Instead of holding on to our wealth and our selves, anxiously awaiting a worthy recipient, we can offer them freely, expecting to have something new that our neighbour has entrusted us to offer tomorrow. Every day brings a new gift, a new sin, a new way to remedy one by offering the other.”
The Front Porch Republic has published two wonderful articles (one a Q&A) on the book Small Isn’t Beautiful. In the first, Adam Smith discusses the challenge Latimer’s book presents to those who care about localism and community. What are we advocating for when we talk about local flourishing? What localist efforts or veins of thought might, in fact, hamper that goal? In the second, Matt Stewart interviews Latimer himself, offering fascinating and helpful questions.
books
Democracy in America, by Alexis de Tocqueville
Reading this fascinating volume. Yet again. In my defense, I’m teaching a political theory class to high school seniors, and so I have a reason to peruse it for the fourth or fifth time. A quote I should probably hang on my wall: “Nothing is more wonderful than the art of being free, but nothing is harder to learn than the apprenticeship of freedom.”The Farmers Wife, by Helen Rebanks
I am only a few pages into this lovely book, but it’s striking. As a working mom and mother to littles, there is so much here that resonates deeply. Her words on page six made it into my Commonplace Book: “It is easy to bury myself in the housework, doing everything for everyone else. It is up to me to share the load. The children need to learn to do some of the jobs themselves. I have to make my family see the unseen jobs and value them.” Can’t wait to share more thoughts as I continue to read.
A Book of Noises: Notes on the Auraculous, by Caspar Henderson
Some of you know that I got a MSt at Oxford and spent several months researching the work of Henry David Thoreau. While working on the project, I grew rather obsessed with the phenomenology of sound, specifically Thoreau’s explorations of sound and of our aural relationship with nature. This book is a delight: a series of mesmerizing essays on the sounds we tend to overlook, the sounds that madden us, and the sounds too far away to hear (the chapter on “cosmophony” is my favorite thus far).
food + drink
We made crepes for Candlemas, and loved this easy recipe.
Without doubt the best blueberry muffins I’ve ever made.
Made a gluten-free, dairy-free banana bread this weekend, and this recipe got five-star reviews. (Apparently all I do these days is bake? I promise we eat vegetables and protein. Sometimes.)
We love homemade golden milk lattes this time of year.
I LOVE that you’ve met Charlotte Mason!
I think you will enjoy the book “a swim in the pond in the rain” by George Saunders, goes into a lot about how to breakdown stories and ideas without dissecting I think at least