Did you know Charlotte Mason believed that composition didn’t need to be taught? In fact, she thought we would diminish children’s natural gifts by too much instruction in this subject. Join us on today’s podcast to learn more.
Listen Now:
Charlotte Mason, Volume 6 (Amazon) (Living Book Press – use code DELECTABLE for 10% off!)
ADE Vol 6, Chapt 10 Reading List
Episode 8: Narration 2.0, the Act of Knowing
Episode 9: Narration Q&A 2.0
Episode 159: Composition Instruction
Episode 237: Writing Grammar and Composition
Emily
Welcome to A Delectable Education, the podcast that spreads the feast of the Charlotte Mason Method. I’m Emily Kiser and I’m here with…
Liz
…Liz Cottrill…
Nicole
…and Nicole Williams.
Emily
Well, Charlotte Mason had a very unique approach to Composition. She didn’t think we actually needed to teach children how to organize their thoughts or give any formal instruction in Composition until the very highest form level, so upper high school.
But that does not mean that children don’t do any writing or really learn the skills needed, right? Quite the opposite.
So first of all, Composition, I thought we’d just start with what is it? What do we mean when we say Composition? It’s the art of communicating one’s thoughts to another person, and it’s primarily through the written word. So writing our thoughts down to communicate ideas to other people. Charlotte Mason declared Composition is not an adjunct, but an integral part of their education in every subject.
So thus, she didn’t separate it out as a separate lesson until we get to Form 3, so middle school. She tells us that for the youngest students, Composition is narration. And we’ve already talked about that on the podcast this season, a lot about narration, because it comes into every subject. This is an art she believed that was inherent in every person. Every person knows how to tell what they know. They know how to tell stories. What did you do yesterday? What did you have for dinner? Those are all narrations. It’s something that we have in us as people. And she expects children to simply tell what they know.
So this is the first step to clear and beautiful communication. We cannot, in fact, she says, we must not impose our corrections about their style of telling or our corrections about their misuse of grammar until they’ve learned to notice and desire critique for themselves. Rather, she tells us that our business is to provide children with material in their lessons and leave the handling of such material to themselves. And this is why Charlotte Mason insisted on only the best books because students absorb and assimilate the style of the authors that they read. It also is important that we give them a variety of authors to read in their lesson books because in this way they get ample practice in Composition as they narrate different styles. Different vocabulary, different sentence structure.
She says, having been brought up so far upon stylists, the pupils are almost certain to have formed a good style because they have been thrown into the society of many great minds. They will not make a servile copy of any one, but will shape an individual style out of the wealth of material they possess. So through exposure to so many different authors, they are not copying any one particular, not becoming a mimic of Francis Bacon or JK Rowling or whatever it is that they’re reading, they’re instead developing their unique voice. And as any Composition teacher will tell you, that is the one thing you can never teach a person to develop their unique voice.
So when we interfere with instruction and Composition, Charlotte Mason says we stultify.
Liz
Good word.
Emily
Yes, it is. We hamper, handicap, diminish a child’s ability to compose. In fact, she says our efforts are in vain and when we get out of the way they rely on their own intellectual powers and they do the work of their own education. Therefore, we see that narration is not simply the power to learn, which we often refer to, to take things and put them in our long-term memory to absorb facts and ideas, but is simultaneously the process by which people learn to express themselves, their ideas and opinions with clarity in their own individual voice. Simply put, narration, the very heart of Charlotte Mason’s method, is the royal road to Composition.
Liz
Yes, indeed.
Emily
So Nicole, would you share what this looks like then in the practical outworking of the curriculum?
Nicole
So one of the things I think is interesting is that the Form 1 student Charlotte Mason tells us that they are totally adept at narrating, but what they mostly do before they start school is narrate what they want to tell, their own little stories, what happened here and there. And now in Form 1, we’re asking them to pay attention and narrate Bible and History, Nature Lore, Literature, everything. And so there is a whole level of skill going on there and we are actually teaching them what it means to narrate in those early ages. They’re absorbing rhythms of poetry and good writing from books they hear and like you said with no explicit Composition instruction at this time. But they can still express themselves with their own particular…I mean if we have multiple students we see it. They’re particular. There was only one – Bible – that she really wanted them to speak it in the language of that…
Emily
Bible lesson, right.
Nicole
But they’re still picking up, like you said, they’re still picking up all those stylists like Charlotte Mason called it.
So in Form 2, that’s grades 4 through 6, that is when written narration begins in earnest. I say in earnest because it’s hopeful that towards the very end of Form 1, they may be able to start doing one written narration a week.
Emily
Or write part and tell the rest.
Nicole
We never want that real hard transition.
Emily
You’ve written nothing, now you’re writing everything.
Nicole
Exactly. And even in Form 2, we do see a transition between we’re going to write one thing a week and now we’re going to write two things a week and now…and we’re going to get all the way to the other side of Form 2 and we’re going to write two every day. So there’s a transition that happens across those three years.
But there’s other things that are going on too because the act of setting words on paper calls for care with handwriting, spelling, and grammar, even though those mechanics are taught in a separate lesson completely. So here too, the variety of readings feeds the writing. And now instead of simply retelling maybe a scene from Shakespeare or just retelling, the student might be asked to tell about one of the characters, or they might be asked to compose a letter or write a verse in the meter of the poem they’ve read. So there’s a little bit more being asked of them here.
Then in Form 3 and 4, so that’s grades seven through nine, Composition time is devoted to writing in many forms. We have essays, letters, ballads, dialogues, scenes for play, again, still drawing on the term’s reading and current events at that point. But here is where we see our first bit of instruction, and it is that they can learn scansion. That is a practice of analyzing the rhythm and meter of verse, which strengthens both their understanding and their own attempts at poetry. They’ve got to understand the poems they’re reading to be able to write in that style if they’re asked to…which they will be asked to.
By now they’ve had years of habit producing the thought, the orderly narration, so they can tackle more of these kind of creative letter writing and things like that or analytical assignments.
Okay, then in form five and six. So this is grade 10 and 11
Emily
And 12.
Nicole
And 12. I don’t know why I left that one off. This student is ready for a small measure of direct instruction in Composition. Here Charlotte Mason says a point or two of guidance on a single paper. Never so much the student’s natural style is stilted like you said, so we have to be very careful here. Older students might write editorials, pressings, or speeches. They might engage in debates.
Emily
Saw that.
Nicole
Rarely, but it was there some. Take on more abstract topics because their education has kept them really in constant contact. We’ve just finishing up Citizenship and Literature and looking at the type of things they were reading at that point, the quality of that material. They have a storehouse of ideas and vocabulary that they can really just put into place at that time.
So really the aim across the years is not simply just to produce children who can write. You know, it’s not like that. Though it does happen, that happens. But the true goal is cultivate thinkers who can really write living words just the way we want them to read living books, now they’re even able to write in that way. So there’s hope for future writers.
Emily
So what big objections do people have to Charlotte Mason’s method of teaching Composition?
Liz
Well, I maybe say this in every subject, but I think the idea of teaching someone else how to write original compositions is pretty daunting, don’t you think, to most teachers? And it’s not because the act of writing is difficult, but you cannot teach someone how to think, let alone what to say about what they think. And Charlotte Mason said there was no course she doubted for any author of note who had ever been instructed in the art of writing. It came naturally to them. And that’s why she said, as you alluded to, no snakes in Ireland. That was her famous quote about writing.
Emily
It’s so interesting because I think for those of us who aren’t confident in our writing ability, the thought of teaching another, it’s terrifying, right? Like we don’t know what we’re doing.
Liz
Because we don’t know how to do it ourselves.
Emily
And for people who are good writers, it’s probably equally…because they’re probably looking back and going, well, I don’t know how I learned to write because…
Liz
I always loved to write but when it came to my own children’s papers that they would show me I would be just absolutely clueless as to how to help them out.
Emily
Yeah.
Liz
And I think this is when we tend to panic and go out and try to find some program that’s gonna help where we can’t. And I think we need to forget about any curriculum that trains them in a robotical (is that a word?) method of writing, that in which they’re just basically mimicking a certain pattern or style.
Emily
We had an editor friend who lamented. She got a lot of submissions from homeschooled students and she could always tell, you know, which program they had been trained to write in and just…they’re gonna be not good.
Liz
Yeah, and you guys have both brought up that it comes down to the books, to the reading. And Charlotte Mason said, people who do not read, do not think. It’s pretty blunt, don’t you think? And she said, you cannot write what you think without thoughts. And children acquire this ability gradually over the school years. And she was always kind, I think, and helpful to children to present them with literature to think about. And then when they start those written narrations, she’s asking them to put their own ideas of what they just read into words. In other words, they have something to write about. They aren’t having to concoct something out of their brain, out of nowhere.
And they do this orally in Form 1. They continue to do it orally. But this is where they’re really learning this skill. They are learning to speak in a coherent way. I think the biggest challenge for teachers is to have the patience that you need to allow them to acquire this skill very slowly, day after day, year after year. And the beauty of narration is that it’s the person’s own personality, like you said. Everybody’s oral narrations are different. Because every person has his own way of shaping his thoughts into words and expressing them. And that is what composing is in writing or composition of any kind. You have to know what you’re going to write about, but then figuring out how you’re going to say it is the big challenge.
Emily
Yeah, it’s just like in, I think, about Nature Study or Grammar, which is Composition adjacent. And we’ll be discussing that later on. Charlotte Mason was adamant we don’t tell children all the botanical names or give them all the scientific terminology of what they’re seeing in Nature Study because they need exposure and familiarity with the thing itself. And the same with Grammar. She didn’t believe in starting that until fourth grade for a very sound reason because they needed a lot of experience with words and reading words and noticing punctuation.
And I just think of my two sons who love Grammar because they weren’t forced to do it, they’re not dissecting things. And it’s the same, like we’re not expecting them to compose without first filling them with things to compose them out.
Liz
So they don’t know when they narrate that they are actually forming compositions, just like when they’re reading, they don’t realize they’re reading grammar.
Emily
That’s true.
Nicole
I would say too, that we as moms have to kind of check our fear because we’re not comparing our children to other students so we’re not having a teacher send home, your child got an A or a B and you know where you’re at. One time years ago, there was a homeschool article that this person was a professor and they put several college students, like a paragraph from each one. And they were making a totally separate point, but I remember thinking, my kids are okay. We just think that well, that’s not perfect, but they are growing. They are growing in their ability.
Emily
I have several friends who are college professors and they just cannot…the incoherent things that high school graduates who got into college cannot write to save their life. And they’re just like, I don’t even know.
Nicole
So maybe we don’t compare ourselves in that way and let our kids continue to grow and trust method.
Emily
Yeah.
If you want to know how Composition develops from simple narrations, join us for the next few weeks as we explore each level of a student’s lessons. You might also like to listen to our older episodes on Narration and Composition. We have numbers 8, 9, 159, and 237. You can find links to those episodes and other resources that we mentioned today in the show notes. Thank you for listening as we continue to spread the feast of the Charlotte Mason Method.