Dorothy Sayers Lost Tools of learning
- Argument is an appeal to authority: because they did this for hundreds of years… it must have worked
This essay gives a more thorough critique: https://www.circeinstitute.org/blog/dorothy-sayers-was-wrong-trivium-and-child-development
Critique of Modern Education
- Organized around subjects rather than skills
- Fails to teach logic/dialectic
- Fails to teach them the structure of thought / how to think
- "They are pray to words in their emotions instead of being the masters of them in their intellects."
- Leaves people at the mercy of propaganda
- "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."
- Fails to teach them the structure of thought / how to think
View of childhood development
- Poll-parrot (4 to 9)
- memorization is easy and pleasurable
- "reasoning is difficult and ... little relished."
- Pert (9-10 to 12-13)
- "characterized by contradicting, answering-back, liking to "catch people out" (especially one's elders) and the pronouncement of conundrums."
- Seems to be an annoying age
- Poetic (onset of puberty to 16-18)
- "the 'difficult' age"
- self-centered
- yearns to express itself
- specializes in being misunderstood
I don't find a lot of rigor or helpfulness in her view of childhood development. Lining them up with particular stages of the Trivium seems arbitrary and actually unhelpful.
Traditional Classical Education was actually mastery-based and individualized to the student. Maybe Sayers had in mind moving fluidly between these phases when they are ready?
Her most helpful delineation was actually someone else's: "When the capacity for abstract thought begins to manifest itself"
Goal for education: Learn how to learn
- Describing valuable skills
- Leaps to a scope and sequence and methods which she believes will get you there
- "To have learnt and remembered the art of learning makes the approach to every subject an open door."
As I learned in the The History of Education course, true classical education was mastery-based and individualized to the pupil, featured mixed-age classrooms, peer learning/teaching, and used memorization partially because of how difficult it was to learn to read ancient greek.