The lost tools of learning

Dorothy Sayers on what it means to be educated

Dorothy Sayers was a novelist, playwright, poet, and translator during the first half of the 20th century. She initially delivered The Lost Tools of Learning as a lecture at Oxford in 1947, and it was later published into book form in 1948. In The Lost Tools of Learning, Sayers challenges the post-World War II approach to education, proposing that education be reformed by returning to the lost tools of medieval scholasticism, namely the Trivium—grammar, dialectic, and rhetoric. Sayers' proposal focuses on the methods for how to educate the young, over concerns about subject matter or character development, unlike others during her time. For her, the "sole true end of education is simply this: to teach men how to learn for themselves." 

Sayers' noted that literacy rates were high throughout Western Europe, but the young seemed more susceptible to the influence of mass propaganda because, as a result of modern educational methods, they were not good at "disentangling fact from opinion and the proven from the plausible." She thought that schools were good at teaching subject-area content, but doing a poor job at teaching students how to think. She claimed, "they learn everything, except the art of learning." Upon leaving school, according to Sayers, an individual ought to be able to tackle any new subject they encounter for themselves. She did not view forgetting the content learned in school as a problem, rather the problem was with a young person's inability to apply methods to learning subject-matter and making connections between subjects, such as philosophy and economics.