We apologize if the episode sounds echo-y. We had some editing issues, please be patient with us as we learn! Thanks :)

Many of us grew up in classrooms in which questionnaire worksheets or activity worksheets abound, or where books weren’t read except in excerpts (and then torn to shreds by activities). Miss Mason saw these methods of teaching as deadening the child’s natural desire and ability to tell back that which they heard, read, or saw. Narrating is something children naturally do.

Charlotte Mason and narration are quite synonymus. In fact, one PR article says, “Ah yes, narration. That’s that thing they do in those PNEU schools, isn’t it?”  We’ve talked so far about the idea that children are born persons, and so their minds are able to deal with knowledge that is proper to them– as long as it’s presented in the form of living ideas. So we can just sit down with a nice big stack of living books, read it aloud, and call our kids educated, right?

Not quite, according to Miss Mason. In today’s episode, the third in our Charlotte Mason Primer Series, we are talking about principle 14, “As knowledge is not assimilated until it is reproduced, children should 'tell back' after a single reading or hearing: or should write on some part of what they have read.”

Books Mentioned: Home Education | A Philosophy of Education (*affiliate links) 

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COMMONPLACE:

That art of ‘telling’ which culminates in a Scott or a Homer and begins with the toddling persons of two and three who talk a great deal to each other and are surely engaged in ‘telling’ though no grown-up, not even a mother, can understand.  (A Philosophy of Education, pg. 190)

The whole thing must be highly amusing to the teacher, as ingenious amplifications self-produced always are: That the children too were entertained, one does not doubt. The teacher was probably at her best in getting by sheere force much out of a little: She was, in fact, acting a part and the children were entertained as at a show, cinema or other; but of one thing we may be sure, an utter distaste, a loathing, on the part of the children ever after, not only for ‘Robinson Crusoe’ but for every one of the subjects lugged in to illustrate his adventures. (A Philosophy of Education, page 116)

It is far easier to force children to  be passive recipients of certain predigested scraps of information, it is a much more difficult matter to allow the child to be active in the matter and to get him to do his best. It requires great faith and trust. (The P.U.S. Method of Narration and Its Purpose, pg. 475)

Whereby teachers shall teach less and scholars shall learn more (A Philosophy of Education., p. 8)