Conservatism and Creativity

And Narration with Charlotte Mason

Homeschooling pioneer Charlotte Mason.

“Genuine originality . . . is a hardy growth, and usually gains more than it loses by striking deep root into the literature of the past.” —Irving Babbitt, Literature and the American College.

Being “original” means throwing tradition and the Western canon to the four winds. In art schools, film school, journalism classes, and just about everywhere else that creative juices are supposed to be flowing, effusive sentimentalism and romantic dreaminess are lauded as “bold” and “visionary.” I nearly suffocate on the fumes of Rousseauism whenever I am forced to enter a Whole Foods (which, mercifully, is rare) or, Heaven forbid, Starbucks. Even at these corporate Hell holes we must suffer the works of the romantic artists in residence—the unbearable, abstract blobs (the art! Sheesh.) screaming at us about “love” and “community,” which really translates to agitprop against you and your Christian family, dear reader. 

See exhibit A: Starbucks celebrating “unique” “artists”.

The usual (queer, person of color, etc.) suspects are chosen to debut their artwork on Starbucks merchandise. It’s really a perfect image of the intersectionality, if you will, of political agitprop, consumerism, and sentimental humanitarianism.

What does it mean to be genuinely creative? We know that the journalism and art school diploma factories are churning out anything but originality in their graduates. Hollywood would rather recycle old material and make a twelfth Fast and the Furious than put in the work to make something new. But this is because genuine creativity is all but impossible without tradition.

Instead of “standing on the shoulders of giants,” our leading lights are lilliputians that disdain all that has come before. They mistake emotional excess and romantic effusions for originality. If we want our children to be authentically “expressive individuals,” then they should be grounded in the great works of literature, art, music, song, dance, philosophy, and culture of their Western heritage. It is their rightful patrimony, and it is what will supply them with building materials for the enormous task of reconstructing the culture that awaits them. 

This work of cultural rebuilding is one that is both conservative and also creative. We must have people who are both. To conserve without creativity is to relegate our beautiful, living heritage to mere museum rooms. To create without conserving is to splash colorful slogans and abstract figures onto a Starbucks cup and call it “art.”

So how to foster in children genuine creativity alongside the instinct to conserve that which is best in culture? I see much promise in a little technique of one British homeschooling pioneer named Charlotte Mason: narration. 

But before I get to narration, I must take a detour into the territory of epistemology—how we know what we know. 

Bear with me. 

An Italian philosopher by the name of Giambattista Vico, writing in the early eighteenth century, proposed that we can know only that which we create. This was a direct challenge to Descartes’s famous declaration, “cogito, ergo sum” (“I think, therefore I am”). No, Vico, says, it only demonstrates proof of consciousness, “and common consciousness, at that.” Sticking it to “Renato,” as Vico loved to call René Descartes, was a pastime of Vico’s—and a worthwhile one. 

Vico was the first serious philosopher to post a real challenge to the abstract rationality of the Enlightenment that was beginning its assault on the Western world. 

Enlightenment thinkers such as Descartes, Diderot, Kant, Condorcet, Rousseau and many others believed that human reason alone could solve heretofore intractable moral and political problems. A single creative genius (these men had, of course, themselves in mind) could rationally devise a new system of political order that would set everything in motion like a well-oiled machine, eliminating the variable of human fallenness. This belief rested on the epistemological conviction that we can have pure access to Universal Truth without the aid of history, revelation, or experience. 

Vico, on the other hand, proposed a fundamentally different epistemological idea. Vico argued that knowledge apart from experience is impossible. It is not certain knowledge. Revelation is one source of certain knowledge, he says, but the source of certain knowledge for the philosopher is history (which encompasses literature, philosophy, art, music, and cultural products). We can have experience of history by re-creating it in our imaginations. We can only truly know that which we create. 

Having never heard of this Neapolitan philosopher of two centuries prior, Charlotte Mason discovered through her own experience, that children know after they narrate. After listening to a story from the bible, history, fiction, nonfiction, a story about art—anything—children tell back what they have heard. This act of recreating the story, either orally or in picture form or acting it out, is the child’s way of generating knowledge for himself. He must recall, consolidate, synthesize, and then retell in his own language what he heard. This incredibly complex process is part of the formation of the child’s mind, imagination, and store of knowledge. He will draw on it, if only intuitively, for his entire life.  

If the child is fed a diet of nourishing, high quality morsels of culture, he will be more likely to develop a moral imagination. If the child is fed the regurgitated slop or thin gruel that passes for much of today’s children’s “literature” and “history,” the child may disdain learning because he will associate it with what is boring, rote, and merely the collection of facts devoid of real meaning. He may lack imagination or, if he is fed sentimental, abstract, and impressionistic fluff, he very well may develop a romantic imagination.

Beginning with what Mason called “living books” is the sine qua non of a good education. Mason devoted her life to passing on the methods of teaching and learning that she uncovered firsthand through her experience. At the heart of her method is this idea of reading passages from great works and then narrating what was read/seen/heard. This technique seems simple, but it is ultimately rooted in a profound epistemological truth about how we can know.

Narration, Mason discovered, is the act of the child teaching himself. All education, Mason said, is self-education. We cannot cram facts and dates and information into a child, she warned. We must spark their desire to learn with good books and assist them on their path of assimilating truth into their own minds and imaginations.  

After hearing or reading a well-written and engaging book or looking at a piece of art or hearing music that is (although she does not say this) a product of the moral imagination in some way, the child assimilates the knowledge by remembering and retelling it. This is part of the formation of the child’s own particular tastes, desires, aversions, religious sensibilities, political opinions, hopes for the future, and general impression of what life is like and what it has in store.

“Narrating is not the work of a parrot,” Mason said, “but of absorbing into oneself the beautiful thought from the book, making it one’s own and then giving it forth again with just that little touch that comes from one’s own mind.” 

Narration is very different from mere rote memorization, which tends to be stressed in the strictly classical (really, neo-classical) model of education. Narration involves memorization but it is the use of memory to distill meaning from the work being studied. The memory recalls the salient points—and points that are of particular interest to a particular child. The child retains what is important but also what is important to him. Just like when we revisit a book after a long time, different parts of it strike us differently. 

Reading comprehension questions lead the child to a preconceived notion about the text and moreover do not require the difficult work of recalling, synthesizing, ordering, and finding the right language to express the ideas. 

The perfect example of old and new—the ancient art of illumination taught in an online school!

The great turn-of-the-twentieth-century scholar and Professor of French at Harvard, Irving Babbitt, observed that great literature furnishes humane standards of conduct at the same time as it inspires further creative work. Reading to children from the great books of the past will connect them with the permanent things, giving them the right intuition about what is worthy and what is merely vapidly “expressive,” political, or sentimental. This development of a moral imagination in children will allow them to be creative in the right ways and for the right ends. They will find ways to keep the past traditions and our Western civilizational heritage alive for their generation and the next. 

We need traditionalists at work rebuilding the culture.

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