In modern civilizations formal education imparts the skills necessary to deal with this knowledge, the ability to read, write, do mathematics, etc. Narrative knowledge is still useful. A good tale is easy to remember because it follows the flow of individual experience, the most primary pattern of neural activity. Narrative knowledge encodes and recreates experience. Writing and other forms of external memory can also lexically encode narrative knowledge and disseminated to many people.
Narrative knowledge supports religious organizations, political systems, and ethnic identity.
Narrative knowledge can be refined in the development of myth or in case studies of law. Narrative knowledge has been amplified by film and television giving it an extra dimension of visual symbolism. It proliferates because it was the way that biological memory held cultural memory during the time that modern humans evolved their cultural mode of adaptation. The human brain is finely attuned to appreciate and disseminate narrative knowledge. Narrative knowledge is the oldest form of knowledge and the natural form for most social knowledge.