Dorothy sayers lost tools of learning essay

The Trivium suffices as a total educational system. Once equipped with the knowledge of how to learn, a child can quickly learn anything at all, retain it, and express it. But what of the practicality?

How will the children of the Trivium survive in a world of delineated subjects and copious technichal facts? What about children who are college-bound? How will they succeed by not only American standards, but any standards? Sayers does not come unprepared. It does not matter what subject matter the student wishes or must learn — he has the tools. There is nothing beyond his grasp.

By revising our educational system, we are almost able to travel back in time, to attain the impossible. But really, the Trivium is better than going back in time because it is in execution today, and we are rapidly losing the tools of learning.

It is only now that, 65 years after the publication of Sayers famous essay, the mainstream education world understands the successes of the Trivium and has begun to implement it. The Classical School movement has had resounding success even in the world of standardized tests and managerial structures, and her children have grown into intellectual warriors, able to handle any task, able to adapt, unsubjected, to any subject the world can throw at them.

The Trivium Explained. Often, classical education is thought of as a defined three-stage process called the trivium. A closer look reveals that the trivium is an instructional method that includes the three elements of the classical disciplines. These elements are grammar, logic, and rhetoric.

This pedagogy is applied from the earliest lessons, both formal and informal. Parents and teachers alike realize that all humans, regardless of age, experience changing stages of development. In order to meet the needs of the developing students so that they can gradually comprehend, the best teachers instruct by applying the three elements as they are appropriate for the students apart from age. The Elements of the Trivium. Although the three parts of the trivium are applied to all learning for all students, regardless of age, they are most often understood in application to the developmental age of the students.

This stage applies to children of approximately six to ten years old, the stage when children are the most receptive to information and will readily memorize. Focus is placed on reading, writing, and spelling; an elementary study of Latin; basic math skills; and developing observation, listening, and memorization skills. Since SCA is a school for Christians, the students are given a general overview of history through a biblical worldview as well as a study of the major stories of the Bible.

In this way, science fulfills the students' curiosity and deepens their awesome wonder of the world. The aim at this stage is to give the students the tools to master the elements of language and to develop a general framework of knowledge.

Along the way the students are taught and expected to make application of logic and rhetoric so that as each student matures, mastery of these elements will emerge. The maturing students naturally begin to demonstrate independent or abstract thought initiating the next stage of development for children ages eleven through thirteen or fourteen. Commonly called the logic stage, students of this age often express sincere questions and a desire to search for the reasons behind long-held principles and truths.

It is difficult to say at what age, precisely, we should pass from the first to the second part of the Trivium. Generally speaking, the answer is: so soon as the pupil shows himself disposed to pertness and interminable argument. For as, in the first part, the master faculties are Observation and Memory, so, in the second, the master faculty is the Discursive Reason.

In the first, the exercise to which the rest of the material was, as it were, keyed, was the Latin grammar; in the second, the key- exercise will be Formal Logic. It is here that our curriculum shows its first sharp divergence from modern standards.

The disrepute into which Formal Logic has fallen is entirely unjustified; and its neglect is the root cause of nearly all those disquieting symptoms which we have noted in the modern intellectual constitution.

Logic has been discredited, partly because we have come to suppose that we are conditioned almost entirely by the intuitive and the unconscious. There is no time to argue whether this is true; I will simply observe that to neglect the proper training of the reason is the best possible way to make it true. Another cause for the disfavor into which Logic has fallen is the belief that it is entirely based upon universal assumptions that are either unprovable or tautological.

This is not true. Not all universal propositions are of this kind. Indeed, the practical utility of Formal Logic today lies not so much in the establishment of positive conclusions as in the prompt detection and exposure of invalid inference. Let us now quickly review our material and see how it is to be related to Dialectic. On the Language side, we shall now have our vocabulary and morphology at our fingertips; henceforward we can concentrate on syntax and analysis i.

Our Reading will proceed from narrative and lyric to essays, argument and criticism, and the pupil will learn to try his own hand at writing this kind of thing. Many lessons — on whatever subject — will take the form of debates; and the place of individual or choral recitation will be taken by dramatic performances, with special attention to plays in which an argument is stated in dramatic form.

It is neither more nor less than the rule of the syllogism in its particular application to number and measurement, and should be taught as such, instead of being, for some, a dark mystery, and, for others, a special revelation, neither illuminating nor illuminated by any other part of knowledge.

History, aided by a simple system of ethics derived from the grammar of theology, will provide much suitable material for discussion: Was the behavior of this statesman justified? What was the effect of such an enactment?

What are the arguments for and against this or that form of government? We shall thus get an introduction to constitutional history — a subject meaningless to the young child, but of absorbing interest to those who are prepared to argue and debate.

Theology itself will furnish material for argument about conduct and morals; and should have its scope extended by a simplified course of dogmatic theology i. Geography and the Sciences will likewise provide material for Dialectic. Could one, they argued, properly say that it had rained that day on or over the town or only in the town? How many drops of water were required to constitute rain? And so on. Argument about this led on to a host of similar problems about rest and motion, sleep and waking, est and non est , and the infinitesimal division of time.

The whole passage is an admirable example of the spontaneous development of the ratiocinative faculty and the natural and proper thirst of the awakening reason for the definition of terms and exactness of statement. All events are food for such an appetite. The newspapers are full of good material for such exercises: legal decisions, on the one hand, in cases where the cause at issue is not too abstruse; on the other, fallacious reasoning and muddleheaded arguments, with which the correspondence columns of certain papers one could name are abundantly stocked.

Wherever the matter for Dialectic is found, it is, of course, highly important that attention should be focused upon the beauty and economy of a fine demonstration or a well-turned argument, lest veneration should wholly die. Criticism must not be merely destructive; though at the same time both teacher and pupils must be ready to detect fallacy, slipshod reasoning, ambiguity, irrelevance, and redundancy, and to pounce upon them like rats.

This is the moment when precis-writing may be usefully undertaken; together with such exercises as the writing of an essay, and the reduction of it, when written, by 25 or 50 percent. It will, doubtless, be objected that to encourage young persons at the Pert age to browbeat, correct, and argue with their elders will render them perfectly intolerable.

My answer is that children of that age are intolerable anyhow; and that their natural argumentativeness may just as well be canalized to good purpose as allowed to run away into the sands.

It may, indeed, be rather less obtrusive at home if it is disciplined in school; and anyhow, elders who have abandoned the wholesome principle that children should be seen and not heard have no one to blame but themselves.

Once again, the contents of the syllabus at this stage may be anything you like. The pupils should be encouraged to go and forage for their own information, and so guided towards the proper use of libraries and books for reference, and shown how to tell which sources are authoritative and which are not.

Towards the close of this stage, the pupils will probably be beginning to discover for themselves that their knowledge and experience are insufficient, and that their trained intelligences need a great deal more material to chew upon. The imagination — usually dormant during the Pert age — will reawaken, and prompt them to suspect the limitations of logic and reason. This means that they are passing into the Poetic age and are ready to embark on the study of Rhetoric.

The doors of the storehouse of knowledge should now be thrown open for them to browse about as they will. The things once learned by rote will be seen in new contexts; the things once coldly analyzed can now be brought together to form a new synthesis; here and there a sudden insight will bring about that most exciting of all discoveries: the realization that truism is true.

It is difficult to map out any general syllabus for the study of Rhetoric: a certain freedom is demanded. In literature, appreciation should be again allowed to take the lead over destructive criticism; and self-expression in writing can go forward, with its tools now sharpened to cut clean and observe proportion. Any child who already shows a disposition to specialize should be given his head: for, when the use of the tools has been well and truly learned, it is available for any study whatever.

It would be well, I think, that each pupil should learn to do one, or two, subjects really well, while taking a few classes in subsidiary subjects so as to keep his mind open to the inter-relations of all knowledge. To show this, and show why it is so, is pre-eminently the task of the mistress science. But whether theology is studied or not, we should at least insist that children who seem inclined to specialize on the mathematical and scientific side should be obliged to attend some lessons in the humanities and vice versa.

At this stage, also, the Latin grammar, having done its work, may be dropped for those who prefer to carry on their language studies on the modern side; while those who are likely never to have any great use or aptitude for mathematics might also be allowed to rest, more or less, upon their oars.

The scope of Rhetoric depends also on whether the pupil is to be turned out into the world at the age of 16 or whether he is to proceed to the university. Only when he is able to do this should he be allowed to dive into the specialized learning of subjects, by which time he will have learned that all knowledge and Truth are one or perhaps we could write One.

Now to the question of how this relates to the learning of music. I have found that at a young age, which we will term the Grammar Stage of Music, children love to sing all kinds of simple, but well constructed folk songs, hymns, chants, etc. Most of them can easily be trained to sing in the head voice and they find joy in learning about notes, rhythms, solfege and even singing simple two and three part rounds. The Kodaly method of teaching music works extremely well during this stage.