When was the last time someone told you a story?
I mean, truly told you a story – not using a book as a crutch, but following a flight of fancy existing solely in thought, taking your hand and guiding you through an imaginary wonderland, private between you and the teller, shielded from uninvited ears.
For me, at least, I was too young to really remember. Perhaps it happened when a family member desperately tried to will me to sleep or during “story time” in the lower reaches of school.
The act of storytelling nowadays has become almost exclusively restricted to parents and their children, whose access to media is restricted by their limited literacy. Apart from this one exception, it is looked down upon by many because of an invisible upper age limitation: though it might be sweet to tell a toddler a story, in grown-up situations its dislocation from the real world is childish, so much so that even private storytelling (i.e. daydreaming) is frowned upon for being a waste of time. There is a myth that in peer-based interactions adults need not tell, nor would want to hear, stories.
This was not always the case. In fact, oral culture was initially the most important means of cultural transmission. Before humanity developed ways to preserve people’s words, nothing anyone said could be more than ephemeral: Homer uses the image of ‘winged words’ which exist only for a moment before being lost to the wind. As a result, the only means to transfer important points of culture through generations – whether mythological tales, aetiological stories, or didactic lessons – was through oral repetition, as bards committed traditional story patterns to memory and then repeated these tales in their own words, armed with a panoply of storytelling techniques.
However, for millennia now, we have gone beyond oral storytelling and developed other methods of transmission. No longer do we have to rely solely on human memory – first books, and more recently audio, film, and the internet have done away with our existential fear of being forgotten: technology has ensured that anyone or anything can be remembered…even if that is in the form of an embarrassing social media post!!
The need for storytelling to preserve cultural information is, and has been for years, redundant. The skills it breeds, on the other hand, remain vital in modern society. This absence of oral tradition constitutes not only a cultural difference in how we see the world around us, but also a pivotal shift in the priorities of our education system: We no longer learn formally how to speak.
Literacy, by which we mean reading and writing, forms a key component of modern-day education and is vital for the vast majority of daily activities. Oracy, which we can define as speaking, listening, and communication skills, is just as relevant as a life skill, yet is conspicuously lacking in the list of skills we honed in school.
Many students might remember the desultory speaking tests we had to do in English to tick a box for GCSEs, and those few awkward lessons where people individually went up and stared at the floor for five minutes while mumbling about a topic that vaguely interested them. It always confused me why this was the only time in school we were taught the art of public speaking, arguably one of the most powerful skills you can master. I’m sure that teachers everywhere despaired as people mocked the need for it or giggled whilst doing their talk, taking any opportunity to break off when a mate was trying to distract them. This is not indicative of their confidence, but their fear, as they are thrown into a situation they had not been taught how to work in.
Why is every other “life skill” such as literacy, numeracy, being able to describe the formation of an ox-bow lake, etc. drilled into us in school, yet it is always just assumed that over the course of our lives we will just figure out how to speak? We do not leave a skill like maths to such a chance in the hope that people might just grow up and have an epiphany about Pascal’s triangle, so why do we presume oracy will be any different?
Ask yourself how many times you have heard someone declare they are scared of public speaking. Probably so often that you could not name a specific example. I myself am one of these people – the pressure makes me stammer and lose my train of thought. I end up making jokes about myself to ease the tension I have imagined into existence. Clearly, there is an unaddressed lack of confidence in oral ability that is pervasive throughout large swathes of the population.
It goes without saying that the solution to a deficiency in any skill is practice. Though it might seem ridiculous to declare that people who are fluent in their native language need to practice speaking it, there is a difference between being able to speak a language and being confident in your ability to use that language to communicate effectively. In other words, proficiency in the micro-structures of language such as grammar, sentence structure, vocab, etc. are sufficient to get us through life and hold conversations, but we also need to be confident using the macro-structures of language, namely narrative, analysis, causality, temporality, etc. to be able to speak – to grab people’s attention, to refute, to persuade, or to inspire. While the former enables mundane conversation, the latter opens up the path to thought-provoking debate.
But what is the best way to gain these oracy skills?
I would like to propose that we blow the dust off that age-old skill of storytelling.
I would not go so far as to say that storytelling could be a panacea for this problem. However, it can go far in raising people’s oracy levels. Leaving the comfort and safety of a written speech/notes can be very intimidating. Yet, at the end of the day, storytelling is just the production of a coherent and persuasive narrative. Once this skill has been developed, it can then be mapped onto a plethora of other styles of speaking that revolve around a narrative structure. Audiences are usually unaware of the background and context of a new story, so the teller, out of necessity, has to be able to incorporate elaborate descriptive elements, ordering events causally and temporally to maintain a line of sense throughout the narrative. They can exploit rhetorical techniques to mark climaxes or place emphasis, use intonation to keep a hold of their audience’s interest, and operate on a level above mere wordplay to maintain the integrity, consistency, and impetus of the story. This is not down to the knowledge of grammar: a gerund is not the key to persuading an audience. A firm grasp of narrative concepts, on the other hand, is what makes someone into a successful public speaker. They allow you to connect to an audience: you may at once amuse them, scare them, stir emotions while simultaneously holding their thoughts in the palm of your hand, puppeteering their imaginations.
Why do I suggest storytelling as the skill that should be taught instead of debating or presenting? The answer is its efficacy from a young age: storytelling is a common mode of communication in children as young as 2 years old, and so can be seen as the base narrative structure from which other types of speaking are derived. Moreover, storytelling is entertaining, ubiquitous, and cross-cultural. It naturally sparks attention and can provide the same narrative skills which are needed for debate or intellectual conversation in a more palatable form. There is a reason most school assignments for young children focus on developing self-articulation (for instance, ‘describe what you did at the weekend’) instead of abstract and academic theorising.
Furthermore, many studies have highlighted the benefits of oral proficiency. Listening proficiency is a significant indicator of reading comprehension, as well as understanding how different postures, gestures and facial features can impact the efficacy of speech and shape the story even though they are non-verbal. Oral language skills are also one of the clearest pointers to later social skills and have a great impact on emotional well-being.
Most other articles on the subject of the absence and decline in storytelling bemoan it for the loss of culture and history – that is not my focus here. Times change, and so do forms of cultural transmission: technological and cultural change are inevitable, and it is not a loss if the means of presentation of the same material are slightly altered. What I mourn are the crucial skills of public speaking and oracy. The techniques needed to have a good story at your fingertips are the same ones needed to persuade a crowd in a political speech, to do an effective presentation in a boardroom, or even to bluff your way through a tutorial.
It is not all doom and gloom, though. In their 2024 election manifesto, Labour notes explicitly that the curriculum would be shaped to develop essential speaking skills and has later reiterated this when elected, in their Curriculum Review aims. Furthermore, an initiative has been put forward over the past decade by Voice 21,a free school in London aiming to provide an oracy-centred education, to make oracy a central part of the curriculum supporting 2,500 schools in gearing their teaching in this direction.
In a world like ours, I believe there is no more important skill than that of communication. Professional opportunities lie behind the barriers of interviews, and when secured, they come with a flurry of meetings and social interactions. The ability to express yourself effectively also improves well-being and social interactions. Speaking is truly the master key to all doors.
The fact that it is essentially ignored throughout our education is incomprehensible. It is a skill and should be taught as such.
Though storytelling is not exactly the most direct route to achieving vocational speaking skills later in life, it is definitely the most effective due to its accessibility across age ranges and cultures, as well as its entertaining nature. Also, it provides the fundamental skills for other types of public speaking – most significantly, language macro-structures like narrative grammar, such as temporality, causality, etc. and rhetorical techniques. All of those things can elevate a complaint to an argument – something with the potential to persuade, to strike a chord.
When stripped of their outer layers, a fairy tale and a political speech are essentially constructed from the same Lego set – just with a different set of instructions.