Children love to tell what they know. According to ancient writing teachers, telling stories (narration) was one of the first exercises for a child to learn.

Narration is the process that lets you ascertain how much your child remembers and understands. As well, it develops their vocabulary and skill of expression. Ancient educators often had students narrate the stories of history, fable, court cases and scientific discovery. Retelling the stories laid the foundation for subsequent writing exercises.


Quintilian advised having students retell either a story from the end to the beginning or from the middle backwards or forward. Narrations could be told from different perspectives as well. Students recounting the crossing of the Delaware may choose to tell the story from the vantage point of General Washington, or of the opposing British army, or even from the viewpoint of a rowboat which carried American troops that foggy night.

Traditionally narrations fell into three categories.
Mythological/fables (about gods or heroes),
Historical (real humans) or
Legal (real facts about a case).

A good story or narration covers 5 key points.
Who-the Agent (person involved in the conflict)
What –the Action (sequence of events, usually chronological)
Where-the place (location, background, surroundings, size of place, distance from other places
When-the Time-past, present, future, winter, morning
How-the Manner- how did the event happen?
Why- the Cause—reason for the event, motive (gain, pride, valor)


Clay Trumbill, Sunday school founder believed narration to be a key for teaching the Bible as well. He recounted a professor who maintained that the mind of a child is best opened by way of his mouth.

Use narration for review and remembrance. Ask your child to tell you a story and help them grow in their ability to express and explain. How wonderful to have your children recount the story of the first Christmas. How about from the donkey's perspective of carrying Mary to Jerusalem? Any other creative ideas out there for recounting this story?

Is entrance into the perfect college or preparation for the ideal profession the reason we educate classically? Educators from the past would have thought us short sighted. John Henry Newman, Oxford Educator, Anglican Clergyman and finally Cardinal in the Catholic Church offered clarity on the final product of such an education. He saw this training in the liberal arts “as the great ordinary means to a great but ordinary end; it aims at raising the intellectual tone of society, at cultivating the public mind, at purifying the national taste, at supplying true principles to popular enthusiasm and fixed aims to popular aspiration, at giving enlargement and sobriety to the ideas of the age, at facilitating the exercise of political power, and refining the intercourse of private life. It is the education which gives a man a clear conscious view of his opinions and judgments, a truth in developing them, an eloquence in expressing them, and a force in urging them. It teaches him to see things as they are, to go right to the point, to disentangle a skein of thought, to detect what is sophistical [plausible but misleading], and to discard what is irrelevant. It prepares him to fill any post with credit, and to master any subject with facility. It shows him how to accommodate himself to others, how to throw himself into their state of mind, how to bring before them his own, how to influence them, how to come to an understanding with them, how to bear with them. He is at home in any society, he has common ground with any class, he knows when to speak and when to be silent; he is able to converse, he is able to listen; he can ask a question pertinently, and gain a lesson seasonably, when he has nothing to impart himself; he is ever ready, yet never in the way; he is a pleasant companion, and a comrade you can depend upon; he knows when to be serious and when to trifle, and he has a sure tact which enables him to trifle with gracefulness and to be serious with effect. He has the repose of a mind which lives in itself, while it lives in the world, and which has resources for its happiness at home when it cannot go abroad. He has a gift which serves him in public, and supports him in retirement without which good fortune is but vulgar, and with which failure and disappointment have a charm.” Indeed, let us educate unto this end!

Hi Mrs. Marshall, I thought that you would like to see a recent article by Charles Colson on the value of Classical Education. It talks about teaching character, as well as academics, which is why we are at CDA and why we appreciate you and all your work so much!! Carol Drury, Parent, CDA Carrollton

"Education which stops with efficiency may prove the greatest menace to society. We must remember that intelligence is not enough. Intelligence plus character-that is the goal of true education."

You may remember that I quoted these lines, which come from Martin Luther King, Jr., when I was talking about a student's convocation speech at Dartmouth College. But they are worth pondering, because they raise a very profound question: How, in today's society, do we provide the kind of "true education" that King was talking about, that develops both character and intelligence?

Never have we needed more urgently to find an answer to this question. The modern secular university can not cultivate character in a value-free environment, because if there is no truth, there is no standard of ethics by which we can measure character. So the university has simply given up on it.

And not only are our schools and colleges not teaching character, but they're increasingly abandoning academics as well. The typical student at a great secular university will not learn much about the history of Western civilization. My alma mater, Brown University, an Ivy League school with a great reputation, no longer has a core curriculum. You can go through the school without ever knowing who Plato, Aristotle, Darwin, or Freud were. In fact, you could major in African drum-beating. So from my perspective, the modern secular university has abandoned both the pursuit of classical learning and the development of character. That's why they're particularly dangerous places today, and it's why Christian students must be well grounded before they go there.

And this is also why I so strongly support the Christian classical education movement that is beginning to spread across the country. It combines, you see, the two historic goals of a liberal education: the cultivation of knowledge and the cultivation of character. It shows us the continuum in the intellectual history of the West that goes back to the Greco-Roman era and, therefore, enables us to better understand our own postmodern era. If we cut ourselves off from the past, we can't understand the present. And it's particularly critical, in my mind, for Christians to understand the philosophical and cultural currents that have shaped our society.

Let me give you just one good example. Galileo, as everyone knows, was thrown in jail for challenging Aristotle's philosophical assumptions about an eternal universe. But, as I mentioned in an earlier broadcast, Francis Bacon, sometimes called "the father of modern science," was influenced by the Protestant Reformation, and he embraced Luther's idea about abandoning the constraints of tradition and going back to the root: the Bible. He applied this principle to freeing science from philosophical assumptions and instead looking at what God has made-go back to the root of things, as Luther did. This allowed modern science to pursue truth uninhibited by philosophy.

Why is this relevant today? Because we're dealing with the same issue. Naturalism is the philosophical assumption that binds modern science. And this is at the heart of the intelligent design debate, but you only see this when you know your own history.

I believe that every serious Christian needs to be classically grounded, not only to understand the history of our own civilization, but also to contend for truth in the marketplace. So I hope that you will check for a classical Christian school in your area-as a place for your kids and as a cause to support.

What do Erasosthenes the librarian, Blaise Pascal the mathmatician, Dorothy Sayers the detective novelist and the modern queen Noor all have in common? They were classically educated as are the students at Coram Deo Academy.
What does it mean to be a classically trained student?
What are the methods, the challenge, the pitfalls and the rewards of being educated in the liberal arts? Click here to hear the recent high school assembly audio.
For speaker notes, follow this link.