The Lost Tools of Learning

by Dorothy L. Sayers

Dorothy Sayers offers a critique of modern education in "The Lost Tools of Learning," arguing in favour of a return to traditional teaching techniques. She suggests that the framework provided by the mediaeval trivium of grammar, dialectic (logic), and rhetoric is crucial for the growth of critical thinking and effective communication abilities. Sayers contends that teaching pupils to think for themselves is frequently neglected in favour of an overemphasis on content in modern education. She contends that the trivium can enable pupils to meaningfully interact with any subject matter by providing them with the fundamental instruments of learning. Sayers' essay has influenced debates concerning the value of teaching kids how to learn as well as educational reform.

Genres: Education, Nonfiction, Essays, Philosophy, Parenting, Teaching, Classics

30 pages, Kindle Edition

First published January 1, 1947

About the author

The detective stories of well-known British writer Dorothy Leigh Sayers mostly feature the amateur investigator Lord Peter Wimsey; she also translated the Divine Comedy of Dante Alighieri.

This renowned author and Christian humanist studied classical and modern languages.

Her best known mysteries, a series of short novels, set between World War I and World War II, feature an English aristocrat and amateur sleuth. She is also known for her plays and essays.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dorothy...

Reviews

[Skylar Burris · Rating 4 out of 5]

Since this paper is known to have had great influence on the emergence of the classical schooling movement, I could not help but include it in my article Learning How to Think: A Reading List for Parents Considering Classical Education.”. I first read it about the time I decided to send my child to a classical Christian school. Sayers argues “that if we are to produce a society of educated people, fitted to preserve their intellectual freedom amid the complex pressures of our modern society, we must turn back the wheel of progress…to the point at which education began to lose sight of its true object, towards the end of the Middle Ages.”

“WHAT?” you might inquire. “You want to send your daughter back to the Dark Ages?”

Not exactly. Somehow I don’t think my daughter would have enjoyed a very good education (or a very good life for that matter) during the Middle Ages. Just a hunch. (Sayers would ask you to define your terms. What do you mean by “send back”?)

However, the classical methods of education do appeal to me. I, with Sayers, am not “comfortable” with the “artificial prolongation of intellectual childhood and adolescence into the years of physical maturity which is so marked in our own day.”

“Have you ever,” Sayers asks, “been fretted by the extraordinary inability of the average debater to speak to the question, or to meet and refute the arguments of speakers on the other side?” Yes, yes I have. Yes.

“Have you ever been faintly troubled by the amount of slipshod syntax going about?” More than faintly.

“Is it not the great defect of our education today…that although we often succeed in teaching our pupils ‘subjects,’ we fail lamentably on the whole in teaching them how to think”? Well, I never could figure out how to answer the “is it not” construction appropriately. Probably because I didn’t have a classical education ;) .

So what’s the classical system? The Trivium. Hmmm...Sounds a wee bit pretentious to me. But then, my daughter won’t start learning Latin until fourth grade so I don’t have to worry about that for the moment, and I’ll just speak English. The Trivium is a three part educational process, progressing from Grammar (employing Observation and Memory) to Dialectic (employing Formal Logic and Discursive Reason) to Rhetoric, in that order, because that order corresponds very well with the three stages of natural child development: “Poll-Parrot, the Pert, and the Poetic.”

“Huh?” you might ask. (I did.) The first stage (poll-parrot) is when it is “easy and, on the whole, pleasurable” to learn by heart, but reasoning is more difficult. In modern education, there seems to be some putting of the cart before the horse. We ask children to build towers before giving them more than a smattering of blocks. We don’t give them a city full of blocks because we are told that “rote” learning is terribly boring and mind-numbing and uncreative and should be avoided in schools. Yet we forget how much very young children enjoy reciting nursery rhymes by heart, how they love to show off whatever they happen to have accumulated in their little, sponge-like brains. We forget how much easier it is for them to memorize as children than it is for us to do so as adults, and we let this precious stage of absorption slip by before the sponge is even one-tenth full.

In the poll-parrot stage, “it is as well that anything and everything which can be usefully committed to memory should be memorized at this period, whether it is immediately intelligible or not.” The point is to gather together material for use in the next state. That next stage, the pert, is “characterized by contradicting, answering back…and by the propounding of conundrums. Its nuisance-value is extremely high.” (Sound familiar, teachers and parents?)

The third stage (poetic) is a “self-centered” time when the child yearns to express herself. It is an age that “rather specializes in being misunderstood; it is restless and tries to achieve independence.”

Now, I’m not entirely convinced of the value of making young children learn Latin. Yes, I understand English has many Latin roots. But it has many roots in other languages as well. Yes, I understand learning Latin will help children to learn grammar. But so will learning any foreign language. I suppose I am one of those people with what Sayer calls “a pedantic preference for a living language.” Also, I'm not sure about the precision of the Tivium's correlation with development, though I think it a generally better method of education than the modern tendency to expect abstract thought even before memorization. There may be too much overlap in the poll-parrot stage and pert stage to be able to distinguish them. When should you move to the second stage of the Trivium? “Generally speaking,” answers Sayer “so soon as the pupil shows himself disposed to pertness and interminable argument.” Well, my daughter’s been so disposed since at least the age of three, but she still has a lot of poll-parrot opportunity left in her.

[Emily · Rating 5 out of 5]

Thomas Sowell put it, "The problem isn't that Johnny can't read. The problem isn't even that Johnny can't think. The problem is that Johnny doesn't know what thinking is; he confuses it with feeling."

My mother taught for 15 years at one of the better schools in the county, and often lamented the inability and/or unwillngness of students to think critically. As I began teaching and mentoring high school age, I saw what she meant.

I ordered this on audio and listened to it two times through. I found it mind-boggling and paradigm-shifting. It was of particular interest to me that Sayers gave this lecture in 1947; it could very well be for today, and how much more so with what the internet vomits out at our young people continuously, let alone the yellow journalism and editorials which pass as news.

My personal observation is that we have made the public schools, their unionized teachers, and other tax-funded extensions of the State sacred cows. In this way, they are inoculated against legitimate criticism, and thereby reform. Instead, they become political weapons, chiefly for Leftists. And, incidentally, I do think there are remarkable teachers out there that happen to care very much -- they are often functioning in a very broken and yes, corrupted, system. There are also a great deal of bad teachers out there, and not just poor educators, but bad people (in our region hardly a district remains untouched from recent teacher sexual abuse -- it is pandemic. Yet where is the outcry?).

As for the structure of learning advocated here by Sayers, I find hers a logical argument. What percentage of classically trained students are high-functioning members of society in comparison to their counterparts? Has anyone undertaken such a study? I myself know an increasing number of families who have homeschooled, specifically in classical education, and they easily outshine many of their peers in manners, maturity, and drive. All of them are in some sort of higher education or entrepreneurs. But that's again an observation, not strict evidence to the infallibility of Sayers' argument.

This I do know: that education today is a far cry from what Noah Webster and other founders declared it to be, and what they saw as its endgoal: to read, study and enjoy the holy scriptures, and thereby better know their Creator. I'm acquainted with Horace Mann and the Boston Unitarians and their role in socially engineering the education system. I've also studied the statistics of what happened when prayer was removed from public schools (far more than just symbolic) and secular humanism moved in to fill the vacuum.

“For we let our young men and women go out unarmed, in a day when armour was never so necessary. By teaching them all to read, we have left them at the mercy of the printed word. By the invention of the film and the radio, we have made certain that no aversion to reading shall secure them from the incessant battery of words, words, words. They do not know what the words mean; they do not know how to ward them off or blunt their edge or fling them back; they are a prey to words in their emotions instead of being the masters of them in their intellects.”

[Lee Reed · Rating 3 out of 5]

There are a lot of people who are huge fans of this essay (it is really more of an essay than a book) but in it Sayers is really just rehashing ideas presented many years before by John Henry Newman. Newman was a leader in the Oxford movement in England and wrote extensively on education. Sayers work is her own interpretation of that work and simply no where near as good. Both works call for a return to the foundations of a classic education, though even this Sayers re-interprets a bit. There is some good to be found in Sayers work, but you would be better served to read Newman's "The Idea of a University..." which is available from Amazon for free.

[Aggrey Odera · Rating 4 out of 5]

I had a conversation with a friend a few months back about why our historical moment seemed to be so short on polymaths. We threw around a bunch of theories. For example, that much learning is driven by necessity, and since (at least Steve Pinker - who is weird btw - thinks so) our historical moment is "the best there's ever been" - meaning most of our problems have been solved (difficult to believe with what's going on in the world), we simply don't need to think or innovate as much about fundamental interdisciplinary questions that affect humanity.

Or, and this was what we ended up settling on, that specialisation was the cause of this; a charitable reading of which would imply that we were simply living in a time of scholarly intellectual humility. This is not necessarily a bad thing. Now, scholars spend years studying and writing about, say, "the effect of the green corn rebellion of 1917 on the fertility rates of the Seminole community of Bumblefuck, Who-gives-a-shit, between the interwar years", or something of the sort.

As a result, our knowledge is more useful, clearer, certainly more rigorous. But not many people can speak on lots of things. We are locked into our tiny silos to converse only with those interested in the same things as us. Take us out of our intellectual comfort zones and we quickly resort to platitudes. This is what many academic conferences (at least the ones I've been to) feel like.

Early modern polymaths were different. Kant, for example, having left Königsberg maybe three times in his life, felt himself qualified to speak authoritatively and write a treatise on international relations - all the while being the most important moral theorist to ever exist. Supposedly all he needed were those beautiful enlightenment qualities of "sensation, logic and reason". Alexander Pope did science and wrote prose. John Stuart Mill was a technocrat, a politician and a philosopher par excellence.

Sayers' argument in this essay is that the kind of education afforded people like Kant or Bentham etc.- the one which reigned throughout the middle ages all the way to the beginning of the enlightenment - was superior to whatever we have going on now. The most important thing to learn, she thinks, is how to learn - by which she means a mode of orientation that conduces us to acquire broad and useful knowledge. This is what the early moderns were taught.

Our education system, on the other hand, she thinks, places too much emphasis on subject-specific knowledge, on Fächer, which we end up forgetting as soon as we leave school anyway. The result is that she thinks we are nothing more than credentialed people who have no meaningful learning. We thus probably can't face novel challenges well, simply because we don't know how to learn. The analogy she gives is of a kid who has had drilled into his head how to play a particular piece on the piano, but who when given a new piece, doesn't know what to make of it because he never learned his notes or scores.

She thus proposes a return to the curriculum of the middle ages: the trivium - constituted of grammar, dialectic, and rhetoric; and the quadrivium - higher training, typically in the Mathematical arts (and here Sayers showcases a fondness for the purported supremacy of logic over the likes of geometry and calculus: always the abstract universal over the concrete - and not useful outside itself - specific).

Sayers thinks the intellectual developmental stages of children can roughly be dived into three stages: 1. The "poll parrot" stage - when they are young and mostly invested in mimicry and repetition, at which point it is a great idea to teach them grammar; 2. The "pert" stage - pre-teen argumentative little shits who, since they are going to be nuisances anyway, might as well be taught dialectics so that at the very least they'll annoy you eloquently, and 3. The "poetic" stage - that early to mid teen stage when people develop a language for themselves and thus yearn to express themselves - but also fancy themselves misunderstood, and when it is best to have them learn rhetoric. Sayers argues that this sort of education, as it was offered in the middle ages, was superior, for it laid the foundation to enable these children to learn anything. They could have gone through the first fourteen or so years of their lives without learning much science, but they could also go to university at 16, quickly learn science (for what they had learned, unlike us, was how to learn), and end up becoming remarkable scientists. This was how polymaths were created.

Sayers' theory smacks of Platonism/ Straussianism in many places. Some modes of education, some disciplines, even some kinds of individuals, are implicitly construed as superior qua this idea of education. But for some reason I, consistent Plato and Strauss basher, don't find Sayers' theory at all repugnant. I reckon it's because on some level it also has Deweyan pragmatic strands running through it, and having been uncomfortable with some applications of Dewey's education theories, I consider Sayers a happy balance. For example, she thinks classical European languages - most especially Latin - should be taught to kids as early as possible. But this is not because Latin is intrinsically special in some capacity (as someone like, say, Allan Bloom or Anthony Kronman would probably argue). It's only because she thinks it will make the acquisition of other (European) languages easier.

She thinks children necessarily need guidance and direction in their intellectual endeavours (not the perversion of Dewey's Democracy & Education that has taken over recently, where children are basically allowed to do whatever the fuck they want because education should be "experimental" and geared towards personal discovery). But she also thinks children need to be given space to reasonably disagree with adults, and that it is in fact important to encourage such disagreement and self expression (hence the teaching of dialectic to little shits).

I think my appreciation is heightened because she struck a balance for me between tiger mom (actually very lovely in person despite her shady politics) and the crass "liberal" parenting that provides kids with no instruction or direction other than to "discover" themselves. I personally wish someone had been firm with me as a child; given me a useful course of instruction to follow; taught me dialectics and rhetoric when I was a pre/early teen - but also given me the tools to question and the language to think for myself and self-define. It would have made me a better learner, I think a better human, and oh so much better at expressing myself.

[Davis Smith · Rating 2 out of 5]

I used to be more generous toward Sayers, but now after spending a year diving into the educational tradition of the West, I've come to dislike it intensely. What she presents is simply not classical education—period. It is in fact, in many ways, progressivism. And those who take her as the model for their pedagogical endeavors are no better than those who do the same for John Dewey or Paolo Freire, for her theories are just as novel as theirs. I find it difficult to believe that such a learned scholar as her could actually think this interpretation of medieval learning is correct. But I'm willing to give her the benefit of a doubt and say she would have done a lot more clarification and qualification if she knew that the essay would actually be treated as "holy writ" in the future.

[Manuel Alfonseca · Rating 4 out of 5]

ENGLISH: Sayers suggests in this article an alternative to our educational system that was well-proved during the Middle Ages, with good results. It consists of teaching students to learn, rather than teaching them things.

An interesting quote, even more applicable today than in 1948, when this essay was written: the most irrelevant people are appointed to highly-technical ministries. How true!

Another quote: It is... alarming when we find a well-known biologist writing in a weekly paper to the effect that: "It is an argument against the existence of a Creator that the same kind of variations which are produced by natural selection can be produced at will by stock-breeders." One might feel tempted to say that it is rather an argument for the existence of a Creator. Actually, of course, it is neither… all that is proved by the biologist's argument is that he was unable to distinguish between a material and a final cause.

ESPAÑOL: Sayers sugiere en este artículo una alternativa a nuestro sistema educativo, que fue probada con buenos resultados durante la Edad Media. Consiste en enseñar a los estudiantes a aprender, en lugar de enseñarles cosas.

Una cita interesante, más aplicable hoy que en 1948, cuando se escribió este ensayo: las personas más irrelevantes son designadas para desempeñar ministerios altamente técnicos. ¡Qué gran verdad!

Otra cita: Es alarmante cuando encontramos a un conocido biólogo escribiendo lo que sigue en un periódico: "Un argumento en contra de la existencia de un Creador es que las mismas variaciones que produce la selección natural pueden ser producidas a voluntad por los ganaderos". Uno podría sentirse tentado a decir que es más bien un argumento a favor de la existencia de un Creador. En realidad, por supuesto, no es ni lo uno, ni lo otro... todo lo que prueba ese argumento del biólogo es que él no sabe distinguir entre causa material y causa final.

[Jake Thompson · Rating 3 out of 5]

I can see why this treatise contributed so greatly to the revival of Christian education, both the Homeschool movement and the classical school. Sayers’ analysis of modern education and her recognition that “the tools of learning” have been lost are helpful and convincing. The problem, however, is that she does not in fact recover the classical, medieval tradition, but instead introduces a new interpretation of it.

I have two central critiques:

First, she does not properly account for the Quadrivium and thus separates it from the Trivium as something to be studied later. When you survey the many classical schools who have adopted Sayers model, the ignorance of the Quadrivium (in its classical, medieval sense) is overwhelmingly apparent. Thus, a recovery of the Trivium without a due recovery of the Quadrivium is incomplete “classical education.”


Second, the Trivium as “stages of development” would be a foreign concept to the medievals. This is because the Trivium were always “arts to be mastered” rather than “stages to advance.” Even if there is some truth to the notion of intellectual development in children (memory, to reason, to rhetoric), embracing the Trivium as “stages” is a departure from its medieval nature and end. I can sympathize with Sayers’ model to some degree, but I strongly believe that it is a departure (not a retrieval) from the tradition. It dilutes the classical understanding of the Trivium as distinct disciplines to be studied, each yielding a corresponding skill (hence, they are called “arts”).

[Katie · Rating 3 out of 5]

Sayers' groundbreaking essay which helped spark the rebirth of classical education in the West. I'm somewhat skeptical of her approach, however. it seems to differ from the historical understanding of the liberal arts and to import childhood psychology principles without a lot of evidence or logic to show why her claims are true.

[Ray LaManna · Rating 4 out of 5]

This essay was written by Sayers in 1947 in the post-World War II era. She makes a strong case for the classical Trivium-Grammar, Dialectic, Rhetoric...in today's parlance "critical thinking." Having been a product of this classical approach I can say that it is immensely helpful. If you don't know how to think and express your thoughts coherently then life becomes a jumble of mindless movements.

While some of her language is stilted with age, this essay is well worth the effort.

[Tony · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book was a great defense of how we should educate our children from infancy to their late teens. Dorothy Sayers herself was privileged to have a father who was the chaplain for Christ Church at the University of Oxford. Sayers was born in the nineteenth century in a time when women were still not allowed to receive college degrees from Oxford. Despite that, I love how her father had a vision for his daughter to be educated. It obviously affected her. She passionately argued for a return to how humans use to be educated for centuries. On page three she writes, 'If we are to produce a society of educated people, fitted to preserve their intellectual freedom amid the complex pressures of our modern society, we must turn back the wheel of progress some four or five hundred years, to the point at which education began to lose sight of its true object, towards the end of the Middle Ages.' The Trivium, taught throughout ten to twelve years, was broken into three parts: Grammar, Dialectic, and Rhetoric. The book goes into detail about the content of these subjects and even recommends ways to teach these subjects age appropriately so students get it. Sayers believes that the standards have become to low for students (and to think this was written in 1948)! I have truly become convinced that what she writes is true. Now being a father and wishing I personally had a classical education growing up, I will be raising my son in this approach. Read this book!

[Shiloah · Rating 5 out of 5]

She presents a well formulated thesis. I agree whole-heartily with her. The three stars is because the presentation of these ideas is very dry and I'm sure I'd get more from it by reading instead of listening. She was very monotoned.

2023- I’m a whole new person with new perspectives and understanding. This felt like a whole new read. I upgraded it to 5 stars.

[Kaiden Tolkamp · Rating 5 out of 5]

The first of many readings for my quarter-life rebrand as a middle school teacher!

This is a snappy little essay full of critique, humor, logic, and wit. With a wonderfully conversational tone, Sayers offers a crystal clear analysis of how our modern educational methods have gone astray and contrasts this with a compelling vision of the true purpose of education. Hint: it's NOT something a child could learn from AI, no matter what the CEO of Duolingo says (see my review of The Life We're Looking For).

I was thrown into classical education at the college level through Torrey and have not fully understood until now what the method and goal of classical education is in the K-12 space. Sayers cleared that up by explaining the Grammar, Dialectic, and Rhetoric stages as a journey through logic. She also gave a wonderful explanation of classical education's view that the division between "subjects" is artificial and largely frivolous because all knowledge is inter-related and ultimately one. Math, for instance is "not a separate 'subject' but a sub-department of Logic." This reality makes it far less important that student's heads are jam packed with facts, figures, timelines and trivia, and far more important that they learn how to rightly recognize and navigate goodness, truth, and beauty, no matter the area of study.

Education is not for the memorization of facts to ace tests, friends. The only good education is one that gives us tools to live well. One that can "teach men how to learn for themselves."

"To learn six subjects without remembering how they were learnt does nothing to ease the approach to a seventh; to have learnt and remembered the art of learning makes the approach to every subject an open door."

If you need a short read (just 20 pages!) to give you a snapshot of the project of classical education, this is the perfect place to start. But beware that you may just be drawn in hook, line, and sinker.

In just three months I'll be teaching a classroom of kiddos! Can't wait.
*sigh* ... I should probably start learning Latin.

[Meg Percy · Rating 5 out of 5]

Such a dear, witty, delightful, and profound essay. I love Dorothy Sayers in all her forms. Poor woman, I rather think she is rolling in her grave at how prophetic her words, written in the 40s, have turned out to be in the 21st century! I also love classical education and hope I'm able to give my future kids the same gift one day (here's hoping I turn out little nerds - the genes trend in that direction and I plan to read to them beginning in utero). One passage that stands out to me particularly is this:

"This reminds me of the Grammar of Theology. ... Theology is the Mistress-science, without which the whole educational structure will necessarily lack its final synthesis. Those who disagree about this will remain content to leave their pupils’ education still full of loose ends."

And this closing mic drop of a statement:

"It is not the fault of the teachers—they work only too hard already. The combined folly of a civilisation that has forgotten its own roots is forcing them to shore up the tottering weight of an educational structure that is built upon sand. ... For the sole true end of education is simply this: to teach men how to learn for themselves; and whatever instruction fails to do this is effort spent in vain."

[Samuel · Rating 4 out of 5]

Kratučká esej, ktorá v dobe svojho vzniku a prezentácie spôsobila menšiu revolúciu vzdelávania, neskôr aj väčšiu a stala sa základom klasického vzdelávania vo svete. Ponúka celkom konkrétny pohľad na to, ako by malo klasické vzdelávanie vyzerať a v čom by sa malo vzdelávanie inšpirovať stredovekým Triviom. Teda, že by malo stáť na gramatike, dialektike a réotrike a čo to v praxi znamená. Sayers samotná nie je učiteľkov a v eseji to často spomína. Zároveň to, o čom hovorí, nemá podložené nejakými výskumami, skôr to všetko stavia na tom, že si myslí, že by to bolo fajn. Samozrejme, vzdelávanie, o ktorom hovorí, malo svoje výsledky už v minulosti, ale či je možné aplikovať tieto nástroje na moderné poznanie, to dokázať nedokáže. To je menšia slabosť tejto eseje. Zároveň však mnohé projekty, ktoré táto esej inšpirovala, dodatočne dokázali, že sa Sayers veľmi nemýlila. Je to teda zaujímavý dôkaz osvietenej mysle.

[Julie Biles · Rating 5 out of 5]

Dorothy Sayers causes her listeners (now her readers), to consider that while children are taught many more subjects than were children of the Middle Ages, are they more learned, do they know more? This short book is an excellent introduction to Classical Education although she humbly acknowledges her own lack of professional experience as an educator. But for heaven’s sake, this is Dorothy Sayers: we should all take attentive notes!

These Sayers’s quotes speak truth and logic concerning learning…

“To learn six subjects without remembering how they were learnt does nothing to ease the approach to a seventh; to have learnt and remembered the art of learning makes the approach to every subject an open door.”

“For the sole true end of education is simply this: to teach men how to learn for themselves; and whatever instruction fails to do this is effort spent in vain.”

I couldn’t agree more!

[Will Allen · Rating 5 out of 5]

Fantastic. Dare I say, a must read for any Christian parent?

[Mariangel · Rating 5 out of 5]

Very interesting ideas about teaching and learning.

[Jordan Tiley · Rating 5 out of 5]

Excellent. While it made me sad I didn’t receive the kind of education Sayers describes, it made me excited to consider the prospect of retrieving these lost tools and handing them to our daughter.

[Isabelle · Rating 5 out of 5]

If you haven’t read this, you need to. It’s hilarious. It’s unapologetic. It’s convicting. It’s intentional. It’s demanding. I would have loved to be in the Oxford audience when she first gave this speech in 1947. I can only imagine the laughter and/or the uncomfortable squirms as people viscerally responded to her admonitions. This is the last sentence; tell me you feel nothing after reading it: “For the sole true end of education is simply this: to teach men how to learn for themselves; and whatever instruction fails to do this is effort spent in vain.”

[Bekah · Rating 5 out of 5]

my children WILL be classically educated thank you so much

[Madison Groves · Rating 5 out of 5]

this!!!

“For the sole true end of education is simply this: to teach men how to learn for themselves; and whatever instruction fails to do this is effort spent in vain.”

[Allison · Rating 2 out of 5]

First, Sayers’ good observations:
- We seem to have lost the educational plot towards the end of the Middle Ages.
- She asks a series of troubling questions about men and women of her day and age: people who had gone through their schooling years but seemed to have little to show for it in the life of the mind.
- Students pass their subjects, but fail in learning how to think.
- Sayers’ reference to the science of relations and education being the servant of religion is spot on, and had Charlotte Mason written all over it (who wrote about these things 40 years prior to the essay.)
- She expresses (perhaps unknowing that she is making this point) that our daily lives should provide the fodder for discussion and logic-building.

My issues with the essay:
- It makes too big of a deal out of the Trivium. In modern times, the three tools of the Trivium (grammar, dialectic, and rhetoric) have been turned into an “Ages and Stages” model, when they actually naturally exist together. Sayers’ view seems to ignore the fact than none of us are static, but are continually moving - this is extremely psychotherapeutic (I.e. first this, then that, then that.) Life does not work like this.
- She lost me completely when she advocated for analysis (dialectic) happening before synthesis (rhetoric, poetic). This is backward. How can a student analyse something that has not first been seen as a synthesised whole? Why would we want our students to do this?
- Her reason for learning Latin (I .e. to make other subjects easier to learn) is dull and uninspiring. The reason that classical education included Latin was because all (or the overwhelming majority of) knowledge was written in Latin and could only be accessed by learning Latin.
- One of her final statements is that “the sole true end of education is simply this: to teach men how to learn for themselves, and whatever instruction fails to do this is effort spent in vain.” The fact that she left out the development of VIRTUE in favour of a very pragmatic and progressive summary statement of education’s aim speaks volumes about how very “un-classical” this essay turns out to be.

I found it difficult to read Sayer’s essay without the baggage of how Doug Wilson and his crowd co-opted it back in the ‘90s into Big Classical Ed. It’s a pity that Dorothy Sayers, the brilliant novelist, was treated as an expert on education just because she happened to write a 30-page essay of musings.

Indeed, an educational philosophy this essay is not since Sayers does not ask or answer the primary questions:
- What is man and what is the purpose of man?
- What is education and what is the purpose of education?

Listen. Charlotte Mason is my homegirl and I am so frustrated that a crime novelist (Dorothy Sayers) has garnered more attention for her 30-page essay than a woman who dedicated her entire adult life to studying children and how they learn.

[Jehian Tiley · Rating 4 out of 5]

Truly a mind blowing essay for such as myself.
The number of words I had to look up, whilst reading it, was a refreshing and humbling reminder (amongst many in recent years) that my own education is painfully limited and there are many things I need to now work twice as hard to learn or re-learn at this stage in my life.
Needs must.

I’m also grateful for the facts that Dorothy be spitting in this dope essay. It left me shooketh, no cap, fr fr.
I was going to say something serious at the end there, but that wouldn’t highlight TFW you realise how much a product you are of your own generation - Iykyk.

[Benjamin Garner · Rating 4 out of 5]

I listened to this at work. It is absolutely fantastic! Nothing gets me fired up quite like a text on education. I feel like I should go read the entirety of the epics over a time span of a week, with no food or sleep until I have finished…

[Rachel Tilly · Rating 5 out of 5]

Insightful, humorous, succinct, excellent.

[Richard · Rating 4 out of 5]

As I am writing my own essay on the Trivium in modern times, I am reminded of this classic.
Great essay for those unfamiliar with the Trivium (esp. the ages in which to engage each art); however, most commentary on these three arts–which is legion–is boilerplate.

[Aleatha · Rating 5 out of 5]

Favorite quote: "For we let our young men and women go out unarmed, in a day when armor was never so necessary. By teaching them all to read, we have left them at the mercy of the printed word. By the invention of the film and the radio, we have made certain that no aversion to reading shall secure them from the incessant battery of words, words, words. They do not know what the words mean; they do not know how to ward them off or blunt their edge or fling them back; they are a prey to words in their emotions instead of being the masters of them in their intellects. We who were scandalized in 1940 when men were sent to fight armored tanks with rifles, are not scandalized when young men and women are sent into the world to fight massed propaganda with a smattering of "subjects"; and when whole classes and whole nations become hypnotized by the arts of the spell binder, we have the impudence to be astonished. "

[Joshua · Rating 4 out of 5]

The main point of Sayers' essay, that learning to learn is more important than learning per se, is a good one (and a principle I was, more or less, brought up on). Somehow, it's more human - slower, more careful - and more eternal-facing (why cram before the exam? why cram before death?). It's particularly relevant today, when ignorance is regarded as a root cause for much (most?) misery in the world (cramming doesn't help. Just look at the students after cramming. Zombie movies could get inspiration). Regarding the classical approach she advocates - I haven't thought enough about it to say anything worthwhile right now, but it certainly seems to have more going for it than whatever educators now think they are doing. Sayers writes with a clarity which (besides being a pleasure to read) indicates a lot of thinking happened before the essay... always a Good Thing. One last thing I particularly liked was the emphasis on the connectedness of knowledge, perhaps because I work in science - something that is, if we ask the gurus, singularly remarkable for its unified and confident grasp of Truth - and find that it is not so unified as all that. For example, upon being limited by specialization, we talk about 'inter-disciplinary science' and consequently miss the whole point. So, looking back on a rather long review for a rather short essay, I guess it exemplifies Sayers' tendency to intellectual provocativeness.

[Jonathan Groves · Rating 4 out of 5]

"Has it ever struck you as odd, or unfortunate, that today, when the proportion of literacy throughout Western Europe is higher than it has ever been, people should have become susceptible to the influence of advertisement and mass propaganda to an extent hitherto unheard of and unimagined? Do you put this down to the mere mechanical fact that the press and the radio and so on have made propaganda much easier to distribute over a wide area? Or do you sometimes have an uneasy suspicion that the product of modern educational methods is less good than he or she might be at disentangling fact from opinion and the proven from the plausible?"

When everyone can read, but not many know how to reason through what they read, perhaps there is a glitch in the system. Sayers' short but punchy essay on returning to the classical educational method of the Middle Ages is quite convincing. The modern education system today is busy pumping facts into kids' minds, but how well is it doing at teaching kids how to think for themselves?

Sayers lays out the fundamental principles of classical education and reminds us of what we all know to be true - it's better to teach a hungry man how to use a fishing pole than to give him a single fish. Teach a kid how to think - give him the tools of learning - and he'll be able to master any subject.

[Cynthia Egbert · Rating 4 out of 5]

Whew. That may well be the most dense 30 pages I have ever read in my life and I loved every minute of it. I truly do adore Dorothy Sayers. How I wish someone in education had listened to her all those years ago when she first gave this speech. Alas, I believe we may be too far gone now unless you choose to teach your children at home and I am not certain that many should do that. I would love to quote the entire speech, but I will just offer you some tidbits.

"Have you ever, in listening to a debate among adult and presumably responsible people, been fretted by the extraordinary inability of the average debater to speak to the question, or to meet and refute the arguments of speakers on the other side? Or have you ever pondered upon the extremely high incidence of irrelevant matter which crops up at committee-meetings, and upon the very rarity of persons capable of acting as chairmen of committees? And when you think of this, and think that most of our public affairs are settled by debates and committees, have you ever felt a certain sinking of the heart?" (EVERY DAY OF MY LIFE!)

"Is not the great defect in our education today that although we often succeed in teaching our pupils 'subjects,' we fail lamentably on the whole in teaching them how to think? They learn everything, except the art of learning."

"For we let our young men and women go out unarmed, in a day when armour was never so necessary. By teaching them all to read, we have left them at the mercy of the printed word. By the invention of the film and the radio, we have made certain that no aversion to reading shall secure them from the incessant battery of words, words, words. They do not know what the words mean; they do not know how to ward them off or blunt their edge or fling them back; they are prey to words in their emotions instead of being the masters of them in their intellects."

"We who were scandalized in 1940 when men were sent to fight armoured tanks with rifles, are not scandalized when young men and women are sent into the world to fight massed propaganda with a smattering of 'subjects'; and when whole classes and whole nations become hypnotized by the arts of the spell-binder, we have the impudence to be astonished. We dole out lip-service to the importance of education - lip-service and, just occasionally, a little grant of money; we postpone the school leaving-age, and plan to build bigger and better schools; the teachers slave conscientiously in and out of school hours, till responsibility becomes a burden and a nightmare; and yet, as I believe, all this devoted effort is largely frustrated, because we have lost the tools of learning, and in their absence can only make a botched and piecemeal job of it."

"To be aware that a whale is not a fish, and a bat is not a bird - all these things give a pleasant sensation of superiority; while to know a ring-snake from an adder or a poisonous from an edible toadstool is a kind of knowledge that has also a practical value."

"The modern tendency is to try and force rational explanations on a child's mind at too early an age. Intelligent questions, spontaneously asked, should, of course, receive an immediate and rational answer; but it is a great mistake to suppose that a child cannot readily enjoy and remember things that are beyond its power to analyze, particularly if those things have a strong imaginative appeal." (In other words, let them play and use their imaginations.)

"The contents of the syllabus at this stage may be anything you like. The 'subjects' supply material; but they are all to be regarded as mere grist for the mental mill to work upon. The pupils should be encouraged to go and forage for their own information, and so guided towards the proper use of libraries and books of reference, and shown how to tell which sources are authoritative and which are not."

"I am not here to consider the feelings of academic bodies: I am concerned only with the proper training of the mind to encounter and deal with the formidable mass of undigested problems presented to it by the modern world. For the tools of learning are the same, in any and every subject; and the person who knows how to use them will, at any age, get the mastery of a new subject in half the time and with a quarter of the effort expended by the person who has not the tools at his command. To learn six subjects without remembering how they were learnt does nothing to ease the approach to a seventh; to have learnt and remembered the art of learning makes the approach to every subject an open door."

"One cannot live on the education capital of the past forever. A tradition, however firmly rooted, if it is never watered, though it dies hard, yet in the end it dies. And today a great number - perhaps the majority - of men and women who handle our affairs, write our books and our newspapers, carry out research, present our plays and our films, speak from our platforms and pulpits - yes, and who educate our young people, have never, even in a lingering traditional memory, undergone the scholastic discipline. Less and less do children who come to be educated bring any of that tradition with them. We have lost the tools of learning - the axe and the wedge, the hammer and the saw, the chisel and the plane - that were so adaptable to all tasks. Instead of them, we have merely a set of complicated jigs, each of which will do but one task and no more, and in using which eye and hadn't receive no training, so that no man ever sees the work as a whole or 'looks at the end of the work'."

"It is not the fault of the teachers - they work only too hard already. The combined folly of a civilization that has forgotten its own roots is forcing them to shore up the tottering weight of an educational structure that is build upon sand. They are doing for the pupils the work which the pupils themselves ought to do. For the sole true end of education is simply this: to teach men how to learn for themselves; and whatever instruction fails to do this is effort spent in vain."