# 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." ## 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.