An essay on Dorothy Sayers essay The Lost Tools of Learning

Ok so this is an essay I wrote for an application I filled out. My son does Classical Conversations and we are starting the process of forming our own community. A part of that process is my applying for a community director role to be able to form a CC community. 

I have two main observations from Dorothy Sayers essay. The first, is, that it does absolutely blow my mind just how relevant her essay is to today. And while, I would like to think she was an alarmist in how the education system was dying at the time, we can see the proof of its death over the last 2 generations since she wrote her essay. Her warning “Christian ethics which are so rooted in their (Atheists, unsaved,etc) unconscious assumptions that it never occurs to them to question it. But one cannot live on capital for ever. A tradition, however firmly rooted, if it is never watered, though it dies hard, yet in the end it dies” forces you to accept that the tradition of learning from before is dead.

The problem with modern education is that students are simply not taught how to learn. By learning each subject in isolation, our youth never see how learning and knowledge are so inner-connected. And by the removal of Christ from our learning, they never see how all learning and knowledge is actually coming from God himself.

My second observation after reading this essay, and also about who just was Dorothy Sayers, I believe she would loathe being compared to Charlotte Mason and what Mason has done for education. Sayers never claimed we needed to start with the classical tradition anew, she proposed we go back 300 years and pick up where we left off with some modifications. Those modifications were about starting to teach children who are younger to learn. She still saw the child as a whole person capable of learning for themselves. 

The Trivium is not the curriculum. It is the tool. All persons are capable of learning anything when we teach them the trivium. In order to understand any subject, we must understand grammar first. In order to learn the grammar of anything we must observe and remember what we are learning. The second phase of learning is the dialectic stage. This is where students learn to reason what it is they’re learning. And then finally there is the Rhetoric stage, where students present and defend their thoughts. Learning to tackle their subjects in this manner sets them up to actually be life-long learners.

What do you think? Do you agree Dorothy would hate being compared to Mason today the way she has? Let me know!

Lori

​To know God and to make Him known.
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