Tuesday 1 June 2021

Self Education & Narration - an update

In the ten or so months I've been involved in presenting Charlotte Mason 101 workshops online at  MyHomeschool, the hows, whys and wherefores of narration is a topic that generates many questions. At face value it seems too simple to be effective. Yes, it might suit a younger child but what about a high school student? 
I've used narration over a couple of decades with my children but didn't really think to use it myself until about eight years ago. As a tool for self-education (reading classics, educational philosophy etc. for my own intellectual and spiritual growth) it is invaluable, especially where there is an opportunity for discussion with others.



In his book, Man - The Dwelling Place of God, A.W. Tozer (a self-taught man himself) has a chapter on self-education where he lists intellectual activities in the order of their importance:

Thinking 
Observation
Reading

Conversation may once have been part of this list but Tozer made the comment that conversation today is mostly sterile. He was writing over fifty years ago and it made me wonder what he'd think if he was alive now and could listen in on the average adult conversation.

I believe that pure thinking will do more to educate a man than any other activity he can engage in. To afford sympathetic entertainment to abstract ideas, to let one idea beget another, and that another, till the mind teems with them; to compare one idea with others, to weigh, to consider, evaluate, approve, reject, correct, refine; to join thought with thought like an architect till a noble edifice has been created within the mind...
and all this without so much as moving from our chair or opening the eyes - this is to soar above all the lower creation and to come near to the angels of God.

Of all earth's creatures only man can think in this way. And while thinking is the mightiest act a man can perform, perhaps for the very reason that it is the mightiest, it is the one act he likes the least and avoids most.

To think without a proper amount of good reading is to limit our thinking to our own tiny plot of ground. The crop cannot be large. To observe only and neglect reading is to deny ourselves the immense value of other people's observations...

Extensive reading without the discipline of practical observation will lead to bookishness and artificiality. Reading and observing without a great deal of meditating will fill the mind with learned lumber that will always remain alien to us. Knowledge to be our own must be digested by thinking. 

Charlotte Mason wrote something that ties in well with Tozer's observations. She suggests that before turning off your light that you read:

...a leading article from a newspaper, say, or a chapter from Boswell or Jane Austen, or one of Lamb's Essays...

Then narrate silently what you've read...

[You] will not be satisfied with the result but [you] will find that in the act of narrating every power of [your]  mind comes into play, that points and bearings which [you] had not observed are brought out; that the whole is visualized and brought into relief in an extraordinary way; in fact, that scene or argument has become a part of [your] personal experience...

You know - you have thought and made observations.
You have assimilated what you've read.
The knowledge has been digested.


7 comments:

ChristyH said...

I like this. I don't think enough. sigh

Carol said...

I think I'm thinking but many of my thoughts evaporate & don't get to the assimilation stage. Interesting that he placed reading last in order of importance.

Sarah said...

Love this, time to get this book. :)

Carol said...

Sarah, some of Tozer's books would probably be found online.

Unknown said...

So happy to have found you. I love Tozer as well. I believe I may actually think too much. I did as a child, but turned it off in my young adult years. Lots of beer parties worked well for turning it all off. I was much happier when I didn't think - happy in a bissfull, ignorant sort of way. But I would not say I was joyfull. Now my life is filled with joy but I do experience deep sadness, as a result of my thought life which is based much on my reading life. Funny, I even think too much about thinking.

Carol said...

Me too, to most of what you've said, Heather. My thinking became unhinged, warped in some ways, as a teen with not much stability. My intellectual development really started at as a young adult when I became a Christian & developed some discernment & direction about what to read.

Sarah said...

Thanks Carol, I'll check it out. :)