The Lost Tools of Learning, by Dorothy Sayers
The problems with modern education in 1947, when this was written, have probably intensified, not changed for the better. The theme that runs through this essay is that students have lost something that was present in medieval education: a sound foundation for learning. They may learn much, but they don’t learn learning or the foundations of language and logic, so they don’t know how to approach learning a new field, or how to evaluate and constructively participate in public debate. To rectify this, Sayers suggests that we should introduce a modernized version of the medieval trivium: grammar from ages 9 to 11, logic from 12 to 14 and rhetoric at 15-16.
The essay is rather more grounded in its day and age and in its author’s worldview than she gives the impression of. Several of the examples and subjects that Sayers considers self-evidently true or important are nothing but expressions of her Christianity. Most of the first half of the essay can be skipped if you’re already convinced that there’s something wrong with education. But suppose we ignore the specific deficits and concentrate on the general sentiment — that modern education has lost something, and that restoring the trivium would rectify this — is Sayers on to something?
The easiest and stupidest way to respond to this suggestion is to accuse whoever puts it forth of being over-conservative and enjoying a romanticized view of the past. I consider myself pretty progressive, but I don’t want to dismiss this outright. We should look to the past for things that are better than the present, and bring them back. We should never preserve the past because it’s tradition — the past has no inherent value over the present — but we absolutely should bring back old ideas and traditions when, on careful inspection, they prove to be better than what we have in the present. Just as nothing is better than what we have now simply because it’s old and traditional and conservative, nothing is better than the past simply by virtue of its existence in the present.
The second objection I can see is that we’ve learned so much about teaching and education in the last centuries that it would be unthinkable to abandon those insights. But of course, no one is suggesting that we should return to the trivium as taught in year 1550. For example, I’ve argued on this blog and elsewhere that at least a passing familiarity with formal logic is integral to almost every path a person can choose in life: being able to evaluate what politicians, friends, salesmen, newspapers, relatives, literature, employees, managers and so on say for soundness and validity is simply something you can’t get away from. Everyone should know how to analyze what a person says and point out obvious fallacies and have, at least in the back of their mind, some practice with and ability to see the formal structure of informal arguments. This was taught in the Middle Ages. But no one is suggesting that this should take the form of memorizing lists of fallacies by rote, or writing out long proofs in formal logic! There are probably a thousand ways we can improve on the old ways of teaching formal logic while preserving the essence of the subject, which is simply ignored in most schools today.
A third objection is that society has changed so much since the trivium was de rigueur of proper education that it couldn’t possibly be relevant today. But that ignores the considerable leeway there is within the trivium concept. We could approach education in the same general manner while changing many of the particulars. We could throw away the theology and substitute it for a crash course in comparative religion, with examples from all major world religions, and we could similarly update most of the rest of the trivium. The question we should ask is: if we accept Sayers’s diagnosis of modern education at least partially, would a modernized, properly secularized version of the trivium significantly improve things?
We can separate the trivium into two parts: one, a goal for what every student should know before entering higher education or vocational training, and the other, a methodology for achieving this. To the first point, Sayers writes:
The whole of the Trivium was, in fact, intended to teach the pupil 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 how to detect fallacies in argument. Dialectic, that is to say, embraced Logic and Disputation. Thirdly, he learned to express himself in language— how to say what he had to say elegantly and persuasively.
I think it’s very difficult to argue against this idea: that students should know the foundations of language, of logic and of how to express themselves persuasively to others. The foundations aren’t done properly justice today — which is not to say that they necessarily were in the past, either, but at least an honest attempt was made to do so.
The second part of the trivium is the way we’re supposed to learn and teach these fundamentals. I have several worries about this. One is that, while presented as a kind of roadmap to critical thinking skills, they, especially the earlier parts, seem to be a fundie’s dream, easily abused. See for instance this website on “the beauty of the grammar stage” (my emphasis):
The problem with attempting to teach abstracts at this age is that children do not yet have the ability to connect relationships between factors, nor do they have the ability to question and reason out the validity of what they have been told, but they have the ability to believe that what they have been told is the truth. That is the beauty of the grammar stage.
Rote memorization of bigoted, unscientific (or worse, anti-scientific) thought at an early age? Whatever happened to the foundations of rational and critical thinking? Not only is this a danger today, but I’m pretty sure it was an integral part of the curriculum of the original trivium, too.
As someone who’s always loved learning and never liked school, another pertinent concern is overburdening to the point of boring students out of their natural inclinations to learn. No matter how much you learn, no matter how many fundamentals you know, an education that kills off the students’ love of learning is a wasted education. That’s not to say that students must only learn what they enjoy learning — but absolutely everything must be subordinate to maintaining the interest in learning. Not learning anything in school is preferrable to learning to hate learning.
The trivium, both its contents and its organization, is based on a model of child psychology. Sayers spends a lot of time in her essay on this. It may be wrong, in which case an educational system based on it would be a disaster.
Should we at least seriously consider a modernized trivium? Absolutely. Where does all this leave us? I don’t know. First and foremost, we should think about these things.
Some earlier thoughts about education on Daily Meh are here and here.
