Canter Bridge

In a season when a determined minority of parents are happy to say that the mass-education emperor has no clothes, it is good to have this little manual from Dorothy Sayers’ pen to provide a well-grounded model of what a real emperor just might look like, fully clothed.

A portion of this 1947 broadside (for in spite of its exquisitely respectful prose, this is precisely what it was) by a British classicist and novelist is that Sayers sounds as though she is writing in early 21st-century America. Via an argument that fast-forwards with magnificent ease, she dares to suggest that Western culture has in a sense gone mad and is employing the mechanics of education to assure that its children remain just as loony as their parents. In other words, Lost Tools is a polemic against those who are responsible for the misplacement of the darned things and/or committed to their non-discovery.

Sayers thinks that education was once done well in the West, and that its hammer, saw, and chisel are recoverable with a bit of effort. 

Those tools are not ‘subjects’ so much as they are a systematic training of young persons in the art and love of learning. Those tools comprise a method, one that thrills to the inborn curiosity of young learners, is patient with their developing intellectual and moral capacities, and expects great things from small fry.

Sayers’ essay walks us through the medieval ‘Trivium’, with its staged attention to Grammar, then Dialectic, then Rhetoric. The boundary lines that fall between these three stages of a child’s development are not rigidly drawn. Indeed, there is interplay across them in both directions. One gathers that Sayers is happy to see a child cycling back to a prior stage where necessary. But the whole thing both points and moves forward, from lesser to greater maturity, understanding, and ability.

There is expectation and progress woven into this three-stage method of developing, from the youngster who quite properly delights in parrot-like recitation to the school-leaver who is quite capable of analytical thought, or of reading a newspaper with a seasoned judgement about the writer’s presuppositions, or of carrying a notion of what it means for a young adult to take his or her place in society with a crisp and curious sense of citizenship.

I was aware as I read, then re-read, The Lost Tools of Learning of certain facts both painful and promising. They include these:

• It is easy to ignore a somewhat antique voice like the one that flows onto Sayers’ page. It would even be possible to scoff at this voice, since we have progressed so far—we imagine—from this talk of Latin grammar and ‘pert’ children and the value of memorization.
• It is not difficult to see why the classical education movement has latched onto Sayers’ essay as a kind of distilled declaration of its Grounding Truth. This loyalty reflects not only having been persuaded by Ms. Sayers’ argument, but also the gratitude such people feel upon discovering a coherent model with which to begin to try again.
• A certain belligerent idealism is required before any parent, teacher, or community leader of our own day can imagine devoting a sturdy chunk of years to learning or teaching this way, against the grain of the loud, dominant models of education.

Sayers herself seems to recognize that something like this was true as well in her day. She concedes that her back-to-the-future ambitions for shaping young lives require a bit of willful spitting into the wind:

Let us amuse ourselves by imagining that such progressive retrogression is possible. Let us make a clean sweep of all educational authorities, and furnish ourselves with a nice little school of boys and girls whom (we?) may experimentally equip for the intellectual conflict along lines chose by ourselves. We will endow them with exceptionally docile parents; we will staff our school with teachers who are themselves perfectly familiar with the aims and methods of the Trivium; we will have our building and staff large enough to allow our classes to be small enough for adequate handling; and we will postulate a Board of Examiners willing and qualified to test the products we turn out. Thus prepared, we will attempt to sketch out a syllabus—a modern Trivium ‘with modifications’ and we will see where we get to.

Yet when the cultural and ideological tyrannies that make such a deal seem unthinkable are at the height of their pompous powers, that is the season when quietly ambitious rebels in our Baltimores, Miamis, and St. Louises—not infrequently driven by desperation—pick up this essay-cum-manifesto and say really crazy things like … ‘We should start a school.’

There’s hope in that.