Home-school Dorothy Sayers criticizes the rationality of the
use of the Trivium, the classical
foundation of education based on Grammar, Dialectic and Rhetoric ,
taught in that order. In retrospect, many branded her to be a romantic,
medievalist and even a laudatory temporis acti (praiser of times past). We
suggest to believe otherwise. Her plead is one that is still relevant in our
education system. "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". As Sayers highlighted,
Grammar,Dialectic and Rhetoric are not intended to be mere
"subjects", but as the means of learning subjects.
Title : The Lost Tools of Learning
Author : Dorothy Sayers
Publisher : unspecified
Pages : 23
The whole of Trivium was supposed to teach the students the
proper use of the tools of learning, before he began to apply them to
“subjects” at all. First, he learned a language; not just how to order a meal
in a foreign language, but the structure of a language, and hence of language
itself—what it was, how it was put together, and how it worked. Secondly, he
learned how to use language; how to define his terms and make accurate
statements; how to construct an argument and Logic and Disputation. Thirdly, he
learned to express himself in language—how to say what he had to say elegantly
and persuasively. Following the tradition, she argues that at some age
(pre-puberty), students should be introduced to Grammar by way of learning an
inflected language. She suggests Latin (no surprise), we prefer Arabic though
for reasons.
She argues that younger (late elementary) children will
benefit from the repetition and mechanics of learning a grammar. It’s not the
higher order thinking of logic or rhetoric, but it’s a fundamental. In my own
experience, I never liked or learned any grammar to speak of until I was forced
to do so in taking French beginning in high school. (Although this doesn’t
necessarily mean that English teachers didn’t teach grammar). So why follow
this prescription? Sayers, remember, worked for an ad agency and then she
published this essay just following the Second World War. She writes:We let our
young men and women go out unarmed, in a day when armor 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. Is this not true today—and more so? What is the end of education?
Let Sayers have the last word: 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.
ConversionConversion EmoticonEmoticon