An Apologia for Narration

[The] faculty of attention…directed toward God, is the very substance of prayer.

Simone Weil

A friend recently recommended Simon Weil’s “Reflections on the Right Use of School Studies with a View to the Love of God.” In it, the twentieth century French philosopher famously argues that attention and prayer are nearly synonymous. Certainly, it is easy to see that attention and prayer are related and that prayer without attention is a contradiction.

The market of the twenty-first century has been characterized as an “attention economy.” In such a market, companies compete against each other for vanishingly small portions of the most valuable, limited resource that each of us has: our ability to attend to the world around us. As Ted Gioia has noted, much of the creative content being generated in the world is ordered not around Truth, Goodness or Beauty, but keeping eyeballs glued to screens, and using the mechanisms of addiction to do so.

In his Confessions, St. Augustine talks about the sin of curiositas in the context of the Ancient Roman theater and gladiatorial games. It’s easy to think of curiositas as mere curiosity, but in her 2020 book Lost in Thought: The Hidden Pleasures of Intellectual Life, Zena Hitz provides an alternative definition of curiositas as “the love of spectacle.” Of course, the entire attention economy is ordered around spectacle, because spectacle is what captures our attention. It captures our attention because spectacle is easy to love. It appeals to us on a natural level, indulging our most common and basic appetites, and it demands little from us. One of the reasons why curiositas is a sin rather than a harmless indulgence is because attention is a zero-sum game. If I give my attention to one thing, that means I am no longer giving my attention to something else. The more that I love spectacle, the less I will be able to love what is True, Good and Beautiful. Spectacle prevents us from loving the things that are worthy of our love.

In an attention economy, there are two paths open to teachers. We can try to make our content as entertaining as possible in an attempt to outgun the myriad things vying for our students’ attention. Alternatively, we can train our students in habits of attention that allow them tune out the things that don’t matter and attend to the things that do. The first approach is a losing one: the best teacher in the world teaching the most engaging text in the world will eventually lose out to the App Store because the latter requires almost no meaningful investment of effort whatsoever. And so, for those of us employed in the vineyard of education, there is really only one way forward: we must equip our students with the tools to attend to reality rather than spectacle. Fortunately, the tradition of classical education furnishes some effective ways to do just that. Chief among these is the practice of narration.

Narration has its roots in the practices of the nineteenth century educator, Charlotte Mason. Simply, it is the act of describing or retelling, in as much detail and with as much accuracy as possible, a singular encounter with reality. Most commonly in schools, narration is used in the context of written texts, but it could easily apply to experiences (e.g. a well-organized lecture) as well. A teacher might read five chapters of Herodotus’ Histories after which he will ask his students to close their books and retell the stories that were just read, providing the narration in either written or oral form. While the goal of summarizing is to reduce a body of text to its most salient points, the goal of narration is to retell what was in the text in as much detail as possible. Increasingly, the scientific literature affirms that narration (often called “retrieval practice” by those who study it) is one of the most powerful ways to cement the content of a text our minds; as such, it is one of the most powerful and underrated tools for learning. Perhaps more importantly, narration trains students in the habit of attention, which has a number of spiritual benefits, especially in an “attention economy” world such as ours.

Some of those spiritual benefits are worth mentioning here. Students who read good texts and are narrating them are furnishing their imagination with a storehouse of Good, True and Beautiful things. A student who learns how to attend to a text will have a richer experience of the liturgy, learning how to attend not only to Scripture and the homily, but to the whole reality of the thing. Further, while narration and lectio divina are certainly not the same thing, a student who is trained and practiced in narration will have a much easier time engaging with the Biblical text in prayer than his peers who have not because he will have been habituated into the act of attention, which Simone Weil reminds us constitutes “the very substance of prayer.” If love of spectacle prevents us from attending to and loving what is worthy of our love, then practices aimed at cultivating the habitus of attention help us to recalibrate our hearts back to true north.

Teachers looking to employ narration in their classrooms should look no further than Jason Barney’s excellent book A Classical Guide to Narration. In it, Mr. Barney provides an overview of the practice as well as specific ways that teachers might go about implementing it in classroom settings of various types.

Anyone who has ever tried narration for themselves will readily admit that to it well is an incredibly difficult task, even with the simplest of texts. Try reading one of Aesop’s Fables and narrating it back to yourself.  It will come as no surprise that, in an age of fleeting attention spans and shallow comprehension, narration does not come easily to most students. To learn how to narrate well is to grow in the habit of attention. As with most things that are not ordered around spectacle, the more often we do them, the easier they become. When we become habituated to attending to reality, narrating a difficult text becomes easier.

Ours is an age characterized by distraction and spectacle. There are few skills that will differentiate the classically educated student from his peers down the road more than learning how to attend to a text, comprehend it and reconstruct it for themselves or another person, and there is no better way to equip our students with those skills than by encouraging the practice of narration, both at home and in the classroom.