There are not all that many discerning individuals who will insist that Western education today is in great shape. When so many students leave high school still illiterate, innumerate and unable to think coherent thoughts, then something is clearly amiss. That is why homeschooling has taken off so spectacularly in many countries, and why the modern push for classical education has become so popular.
Here I speak to her essay “The Lost Tools of Learning” delivered in Oxford in 1947, and published a year later. In it she bemoaned the fact that the great and lofty standards of education of centuries ago are now all but lost on contemporary students. A return to classical learning, in one form or another, is a large part of the remedy. Some quotes from that piece are worth offering here. Early on she says:
[S]ince much that I have to say is highly controversial, it will be pleasant to start with a proposition with which, I feel confident, all teachers will cordially agree; and that is, that they all work much too hard and have far too many things to do. One has only to look at any school or examination syllabus to see that it is cluttered up with a great variety of exhausting subjects which they are called upon to teach, and the teaching of which sadly interferes with what every thoughtful mind will allow to be their proper duties…
Upon these really important duties I will not enlarge. I propose only to deal with the subject of teaching, properly so-called. I want to inquire whether, amid all the multitudinous subjects which figure in the syllabuses, we are really teaching the right things in the right way; and whether, by teaching fewer things, differently, we might not succeed in “shedding the load” (as the fashionable phrase goes) and, at the same time, producing a better result.
This prospect need arouse neither hope nor alarm. It is in the highest degree improbable that the reforms I propose will ever be carried into effect. Neither the parents, nor the training colleges, nor the examination boards, nor the boards of governors, nor the Ministry of Education would countenance them for a moment. For they amount to this: that if we are to produce a society of educated people, fitted to preserve their intellectual freedom amid the complex pressures of our modern society, we must turn back the wheel of progress some four or five hundred years, to the point at which education began to lose sight of its true object, towards the end of the Middle Ages.
She looks at how things have gone downhill:
Has it ever struck you as odd, or unfortunate, that to-day, when the proportion of literacy throughout Western Europe is higher than it has ever been, people should have become susceptible to the influence of advertisement and mass-propaganda to an extent hitherto unheard-of and unimagined? Do you put this down to the mere mechanical fact that the press and the radio and so on have made propaganda much easier to distribute over a wide area? Or do you sometimes have an uneasy suspicion that the product of modern educational methods is less good than he or she might be at disentangling fact from opinion and the proven from the plausible?…
Do you ever find that young people, when they have left school, not only forget most of what they have learnt (that is only to be expected) but forget also, or betray that they have never really known, how to tackle a new subject for themselves? Are you often bothered by coming across grown-up men and women who seem unable to distinguish between a book that is sound, scholarly and properly documented, and one that is to any trained eye, very conspicuously none of these things? Or who cannot handle a library catalogue? Or who, when faced with a book of reference, betray a curious inability to extract from it the passages relevant to the particular question which interests them?
And again:
Is it not the great defect of our education today (a defect traceable through all the disquieting symptoms of trouble that I have mentioned) that although we often succeed in teaching our pupils “subjects,” we fail lamentably on the whole in teaching them how to think? They learn everything, except the art of learning. It is as though we had taught a child mechanically and by rule of thumb, to play The Harmonious Blacksmith upon the piano, but had never taught him the scale or how to read music; so that, having memorised The Harmonious Blacksmith, he still had not the faintest notion how to proceed from that to tackle The Last Rose of Summer. Why do I say, “As though”? In certain of the arts and crafts we sometimes do precisely this—requiring a child to “express himself ” in paint before we teach him how to handle the colours and the brush. There is a school of thought which believes this to be the right way to set about the job. But observe—it is not the way in which a trained craftsman will go about to teach himself a new medium. He, having learned by experience the best way to economise labour and take the thing by the right end, will start off by doodling about on an odd piece of material, in order to “give himself the feel of the tool.”
She then discusses “what the men of the Middle Ages supposed to be the object and the right order of the educative process. The syllabus was divided into two parts: the Trivium and Quadrivium…” She looks at this in some detail and reminds us where we are now at, having lost it:
For we let our young men and women go out unarmed, in a day when armour was never so necessary. By teaching them all to read, we have left them at the mercy of the printed word. By the invention of the film and the radio, we have made certain that no aversion to reading shall secure them from the incessant battery of words, words, words. They do not know what the words mean; they do not know how to ward them off or blunt their edge or fling them back; they are a prey to words in their emotions instead of being the masters of them in their intellects. We who were scandalized in 1940 when men were sent to fight armoured tanks with rifles, are not scandalised when young 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 hypnotised by the arts of the spellbinder, we have the impudence to be astonished. We dole out lip-service to the importance of education—lip-service and, just occasionally, a little grant of money; we postpone the school leaving-age, and plan to build bigger and better schools; the teachers slave conscientiously in and out of school-hours, till responsibility becomes a burden and a nightmare; and yet, as I believe, all this devoted effort is largely frustrated, because we have lost the tools of learning, and in their absence can only make a botched and piecemeal job of it.
She concludes:
Today a great number—perhaps the majority—of the men and women who handle our affairs, write our books and our newspapers, carry out research, present our plays and our films, speak from our platforms and pulpits—yes, and who educate our young people, have never, even in a lingering traditional memory, undergone the scholastic discipline. Less and less do the children who come to be educated bring any of that tradition with them. We have lost the tools of learning—the axe and the wedge, the hammer and the saw, the chisel and the plane—that were so adaptable to all tasks. Instead of them, we have merely a set of complicated jigs, each of which will do but one task and no more, and in using which eye and hand receive no training, so that no man ever sees the work as a whole or “looks to the end of the work.” What use is it to pile task on task and prolong the days of labour, if at the close the chief object is left unattained? It is not the fault of the teachers—they work only too hard already. The combined folly of a civilisation that has forgotten its own roots is forcing them to shore up the tottering weight of an educational structure that is built upon sand. They are doing for their pupils the work which the pupils themselves ought to do. For the sole true end of education is simply this: to teach men how to learn for themselves; and whatever instruction fails to do this is effort spent in vain.
Given that I just wrote a piece on an important set of books on the biblical worldview from a few decades back, let me briefly mention just one by Douglas Wilson: Recovering the Lost Tools of Learning: An Approach to Distinctively Christian Education (Crossway, 1991).
Recovering the Lost Tools of Learning: An Approach to Distinctively Christian Educationby Douglas Wilson (Author), Gentry Rench (Narrator), Canon Press (Publisher)
Wilson is a major proponent of homeschooling and classical education. He of course refers to Sayers often, and features her essay in an Appendix. Here are two quotes from his closing chapter on the need for classical and Christian education:
Once we have worked out a distinctively Christian approach to education, we are still not done. A Christian school requires diligent thought and hard work in prayer. It is not enough to take whatever educational philosophy is currently about, add prayer and a Bible class, and somehow think that the result will be satisfactory. We want not only a Christian education; we want also a classical education. But in order for a thorough education to be established anywhere, the thinking must be radical. Radical thinking is not necessarily revolutionary thinking. Radical comes from the Latin root radix, which means “root.” What are the sorts of education in our western civilization? Dorothy Sayers answered the question in her essay The Lost Tools of Learning. She applied the structure of the medieval pattern for education and found that it fit the development of young people very well indeed. The three parts of the Trivium are grammar, logic and rhetoric. The three stages children go through that correspond to the Trivium she labels as the Poll-parrot, Pert and Poetic stages. We have sought to build our curriculum around this structure and have found that it works…
If we really begin to educate our children as the Bible requires, the future is hopeful for us and our children. If we do not, the future remains hopeful – but not for us. God is still God, and He remains in control. Christ is the ruler of the nations, regardless of what we do. But the consequences of both obedience and disobedience flow downstream. More than once in history, God has withdrawn his blessings from people who ceased to fear Him and given those blessings to those who worship and serve Him in everything. His word will go forth and it will not return empty; His word will be accomplished. As the wonderful Old Testament vision had it, the earth will be as full of the knowledge of the Lord as the waters cover the sea (Isaiah 11:9). Children will be taught in the Lord. The only question is whether our children will be in that number. The answer to that question is found in our obedience or lack of it. As we seek to obey God in this question of education, we need to remember what is at stake. It is not the purpose of God in history. That will be accomplished no matter what we do. What then, is at stake? It is nothing less than the blessing of God on us and our children.
