Dorothy Sayers Deserves a Hearing

Dorothy Sayers wrote a ground-breaking essay on the problems of modern education called “The Lost Tools of Education.” In the essay, she discusses the main problem of modern education and a possible solution. She laments that the solution will never be tried, but it is precisely that solution that Doug Wilson and others have implemented to bring about the Classical Education movement.
Sayers writes that modern education teaches fragmented subjects instead of teaching a child how to think. Every subject comes to a student as a foreign language that he struggles to decode. A student has no ability to integrate new information with what he already knows and no ability to express what he has learned persuasively.
In the essay, Sayers believes the answer to the problems of modern education lies in the trivium, going back to the educational ideas of an earlier age. The trivium has three parts, each of which teaches the child how to think. The Grammar stage (Elementary years) emphasizes memorization and repetition of basic facts and terms so that the child has the basic terms and facts to build upon. The Dialectic stage (Junior High) begins the process of integration, seeing the logical relationships between ideas. Students begin studying logic in order to think and argue in a rational orderly way. The Rhetoric Stage (High School) helps the student learn to present his ideas in a persuasive way.
Sayers argues that when the student has learned how to think, he is well on his way to master any subject easily. Because he has learned how to think, he can more easily see the connections between subjects. Because Christ is at the center, all subjects will necessarily relate to him and to each other. This brings a fragmented education together into a unified whole.
The essay Sayers wrote has become the basis of a new way of learning. Public education has become consensus education, where everyone holds the politically correct opinion and those who don’t are scorned. Classical education gives the student freedom to go wherever the facts take him. And because the world is Christ’s, the student can be sure truth will always fit together.