Welcome to the Simply Charlotte Mason podcast. I'm Sonia Schaefer. When I was in grade school,

a practical joke was popular. The jokester would find an unsuspecting and cooperative child

to listen carefully and repeat these nonsense syllables. Oh, wa, ta, gu, sa'am.

And as the syllables became more and more familiar, the child would be encouraged to repeat them

faster and faster.

Oh, wa, ta, gu, sa'am, until he inadvertently formed an unintentional announcement about himself.

Oh, what a goose I am. Oh, what a goose I am. Oh, what a goose I am. It was a silly little joke.

But it came to mind as I was pondering something Charlotte Mason described in a philosophy

of education, pages 173 to 175. She contrasted two kinds of memory, word memory and mind memory.

She was writing about the practice of narrating. The teacher reads and the children

tell paragraph by paragraph, passage by passage. The first efforts may be stumbling, but presently

the children get into their stride and tell a passage at length with surprising fluency.

If you're familiar with Charlotte Mason at all, those practices are nothing new. But then she

brought up an objection that some people in her day, and some in ours, sometimes mention.

They think that narration is merely an exercise of memory.

So Charlotte drew a distinction between what is happening in the brain during memorizing

and what is happening during narration.

One depends on word memory and the other on mind memory. Here's how she explained it.

Now, a passage to be memorized requires much conning, much repetition. And meanwhile, the learners

are thinking about other things. That is, the mind is not at work in the act of

memorizing. To read a passage with full attention and to tell it afterwards has a curiously

different effect. Trusting to mind memory, we visualize the scene, are convinced by the arguments, take pleasure

...