Why are we so hung up on narration?

What if the reason for narration was not because it was the best way for children to process a reading, but because narration was a reaction to the educational methods being used in Victorian England? In Victorian England, instructors did the talking and students did the listening. Because students were viewed as containers to be filled, they weren’t explicitly taught how to process new learning. But if this isn’t effective, then maybe students aren’t containers. Maybe this understanding of what a student is not leads us to an understanding of what a student is, and maybe this understanding brings us to the realization that a student needs to process new learning. This realization leads to the need for a method, a method which can be explicitly taught, for processing new learning. Narration was a method. Could it be that the real lesson here is not that narration is the right way, the only way, but that a person needs to process new learning? Could there be other ways? More organic, more enjoyable, more effective ways?