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Title: The Lost Tools of Learning
Date of first publication: 1948
Place and date of edition used as base for this ebook:
   London: Methuen, 1948 (First Edition)
Author: Dorothy L. Sayers (1893-1957)
Date first posted: 13 January 2008
Date last updated: 13 January 2008
Project Gutenberg Canada ebook #60

This ebook was produced by: Dr Mark Bear Akrigg




    THE LOST TOOLS
    OF LEARNING




    Paper read at a Vacation Course in
    Education, Oxford 1947

    by

    DOROTHY L. SAYERS




    METHUEN & CO. LTD. LONDON
    36 Essex Street, Strand, W. C. 2


    _First published in 1948_


    The bulk of this pamphlet
    appeared as an article in the
    _Hibbert Journal_


    CATALOGUE NO. 3533/U

    PRINTED IN GREAT BRITAIN BY
    E. T. HERON & CO., LTD., LONDON AND SILVER END, ESSEX




THE LOST TOOLS OF LEARNING


That I, whose experience of teaching is extremely limited,
and whose life of recent years has been almost wholly out of
touch with educational circles, should presume to discuss
education is a matter, surely, that calls for no apology. It
is a kind of behaviour to which the present climate of
opinion is wholly favourable. Bishops air their opinions
about economics; biologists, about metaphysics; celibates,
about matrimony; inorganic chemists about theology; the most
irrelevant people are appointed to highly-technical
ministries; and plain, blunt men write to the papers to say
that Epstein and Picasso do not know how to draw. Up to a
certain point, and provided that the criticisms are made
with a reasonable modesty, these activities are commendable.
Too much specialisation is not a good thing. There is also
one excellent reason why the veriest amateur may feel
entitled to have an opinion about education. For if we are
not all professional teachers, we have all, at some time or
other, been taught. Even if we learnt nothing--perhaps in
particular if we learnt nothing--our contribution to the
discussion may have a potential value.

Without apology, then, I will begin. But since 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, such
as distributing milk, supervising meals, taking cloak-room
duty, weighing and measuring pupils, keeping their eyes open
for incipient mumps, measles and chicken-pox, making out
lists, escorting parties round the Victoria and Albert
Museum, filling up forms, interviewing parents, and devising
end-of-term reports which shall combine a deep veneration
for truth with a tender respect for the feelings of all
concerned.

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.

Before you dismiss me with the appropriate
phrase--reactionary, romantic, mediaevalist, _laudator
temporis acti_, or whatever tag comes first to hand--I will
ask you to consider one or two miscellaneous questions that
hang about at the back, perhaps, of all our minds, and
occasionally pop out to worry us.

When we think about the remarkably early age at which the
young men went up to the University in, let us say, Tudor
times, and thereafter were held fit to assume responsibility
for the conduct of their own affairs, are we altogether
comfortable about that artificial prolongation of
intellectual childhood and adolescence into the years of
physical maturity which is so marked in our own day? To
postpone the acceptance of responsibility to a late date
brings with it a number of psychological complications
which, while they may interest the psychiatrist, are
scarcely beneficial either to the individual or to society.
The stock argument in favour of postponing the school
leaving-age and prolonging the period of education generally
is that there is now so much more to learn than there was in
the Middle Ages. This is partly true, but not wholly. The
modern boy and girl are certainly taught more subjects--but
does that always mean that they are actually more learned
and know more? That is the very point which we are going to
consider.

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?

Have you ever, in listening to a debate among adult and
presumably responsible people, been fretted by the
extraordinary inability of the average debater to speak to
the question, or to meet and refute the arguments of
speakers on the other side? Or have you ever pondered upon
the extremely high incidence of irrelevant matter which
crops up at committee-meetings, and upon the very great
rarity of persons capable of acting as chairmen of
committees? And when you think of this, and think that most
of our public affairs are settled by debates and committees,
have you ever felt a certain sinking of the heart?

Have you ever followed a discussion in the newspapers or
elsewhere and noticed how frequently writers fail to define
the terms they use? Or how often, if one man does define his
terms, another will assume in his reply that he was using
the terms in precisely the opposite sense to that in which
he has already defined them?

Have you ever been faintly troubled by the amount of
slipshod syntax going about? And if so, are you troubled
because it is inelegant or because it may lead to dangerous
misunderstanding?

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?

Do you often come across people for whom, all their lives, a
"subject" remains a "subject," divided by water-tight
bulkheads from all other "subjects," so that they experience
very great difficulty in making an immediate mental
connection between, let us say, algebra and detective
fiction, sewage disposal and the price of salmon, cellulose
and the distribution of rainfall--or, more generally,
between such spheres of knowledge as philosophy and
economics, or chemistry and art?

Are you occasionally perturbed by the things written by
adult men and women for adult men and women to read? Here,
for instance, is a quotation from an evening paper. It
refers to the visit of an Indian girl to this country:--

    Miss Bhosle has a perfect command of English ("Oh, gosh,"
    she said once), and a marked enthusiasm for London.

Well, we may all talk nonsense in a moment of inattention.
It is more alarming when we find a well-known biologist
writing in a weekly paper to the effect that: "It is an
argument against the existence of a Creator" (I think he put
it more strongly; but since I have, most unfortunately,
mislaid the reference, I will put his claim at its
lowest)--"an argument against the existence of a Creator
that the same kind of variations which are produced by
natural selection can be produced at will by
stock-breeders." One might feel tempted to say that it is
rather an argument _for_ the existence of a Creator.
Actually, of course, it is neither: all it proves is that
the same material causes (re-combination of the chromosomes
by cross-breeding and so forth) are sufficient to account
for all observed variations--just as the various
combinations of the same 13 semitones are materially
sufficient to account for Beethoven's Moonlight Sonata and
the noise the cat makes by walking on the keys. But the
cat's performance neither proves nor disproves the existence
of Beethoven; and all that is proved by the biologist's
argument is that he was unable to distinguish between a
material and a final cause.

Here is a sentence from no less academic a source than a
front-page article in the _Times Literary Supplement_:--

    The Frenchman, Alfred Epinas, pointed out that certain
    species (_e.g._, ants and wasps) can only face the horrors
    of life and death in association.

I do not know what the Frenchman actually did say: what the
Englishman says he said is patently meaningless. We cannot
know whether life holds any horror for the ant, nor in what
sense the isolated wasp which you kill upon the window-pane
can be said to "face" or not to "face" the horrors of death.
The subject of the article is mass-behaviour in _man_; and
the human motives have been unobtrusively transferred from
the main proposition to the supporting instance. Thus the
argument, in effect, assumes what it sets out to prove--a
fact which would become immediately apparent if it were
presented in a formal syllogism. This is only a small and
haphazard example of a vice which pervades whole
books--particularly books written by men of science on
metaphysical subjects.

Another quotation from the same issue of the T.L.S. comes in
fittingly here to wind up this random collection of
disquieting thoughts--this time from a review of Sir Richard
Livingstone's _Some Tasks for Education_:--

    More than once the reader is reminded of the value of an
    intensive study of at least one subject, so as to learn "the
    meaning of knowledge" and what precision and persistence is
    needed to attain it. Yet there is elsewhere full recognition
    of the distressing fact that a man may be master in one
    field and show no better judgment than his neighbour
    anywhere else; he remembers what he has learnt, but forgets
    altogether how he learned it.

I would draw your attention particularly to that last
sentence, which offers an explanation of what the writer
rightly calls the "distressing fact" that the intellectual
skills bestowed upon us by our education are not readily
transferable to subjects other than those in which we
acquired them: "he remembers what he has learnt, but forgets
altogether how he learned it."

Is not the great defect of our education to-day--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."

Let us now look at the mediaeval scheme of education--the
syllabus of the Schools. It does not matter, for the moment,
whether it was devised for small children or for older
students; or how long people were supposed to take over it.
What matters is the light it throws upon 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. The second part--the Quadrivium--consisted of
"subjects," and need not for the moment concern us. The
interesting thing for us is the composition of the Trivium,
which preceded the Quadrivium and was the preliminary
discipline for it. It consisted of three parts: Grammar,
Dialectic, and Rhetoric, in that order.

Now the first thing we notice is that two at any rate of
these "subjects" are not what we should call "subjects" at
all: they are only methods of dealing with subjects.
Grammar, indeed, is a "subject" in the sense that it does
mean definitely learning a language--at that period it meant
learning Latin. But language itself is simply the medium in
which thought is expressed. 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 language--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 (his own arguments and
other people's). 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. At this point, any tendency to express himself
windily or to use his eloquence so as to make the worse
appear the better reason would, no doubt, be restrained by
his previous teaching in Dialectic. If not, his teacher and
his fellow-pupils, trained along the same lines, would be
quick to point out where he was wrong; for it was they whom
he had to seek to persuade. At the end of his course, he was
required to compose a thesis upon some theme set by his
masters or chosen by himself, and afterwards to defend his
thesis against the criticism of the faculty. By this time he
would have learned--or woe betide him--not merely to write
an essay on paper, but to speak audibly and intelligibly
from a platform, and to use his wits quickly when heckled.
The heckling, moreover, would not consist solely of
offensive personalities or of irrelevant queries about what
Julius Caesar said in 55 B.C.--though no doubt mediaeval
dialectic was enlivened in practice by plenty of such
primitive repartee. But there would also be questions,
cogent and shrewd, from those who had already run the
gauntlet of debate, or were making ready to run it.

It is, of course, quite true that bits and pieces of the
mediaeval tradition still linger, or have been revived, in
the ordinary school syllabus of to-day. Some knowledge of
grammar is still required when learning a foreign
language--perhaps I should say, "is again required"; for
during my own lifetime we passed through a phase when the
teaching of declensions and conjugations was considered
rather reprehensible, and it was considered better to pick
these things up as we went along. School debating societies
flourish; essays are written; the necessity for
"self-expression" is stressed, and perhaps even
over-stressed. But these activities are cultivated more or
less in detachment, as belonging to the special subjects in
which they are pigeon-holed rather than as forming one
coherent scheme of mental training to which all "subjects"
stand in a subordinate relation. "Grammar" belongs
especially to the "subject" of foreign languages, and
essay-writing to the "subject" called "English"; while
Dialectic has become almost entirely divorced from the rest
of the curriculum, and is frequently practised
unsystematically and out of school-hours as a separate
exercise, only very loosely related to the main business of
learning. Taken by and large, the great difference of
emphasis between the two conceptions holds good: modern
education concentrates on _teaching subjects_, leaving the
method of thinking, arguing and expressing one's conclusions
to be picked up by the scholar as he goes along; mediaeval
education concentrated on first _forging and learning to
handle the tools of learning_, using whatever subject came
handy as a piece of material on which to doodle until the
use of the tool became second nature.

"Subjects" of some kind there must be, of course. One cannot
learn the use of a tool by merely waving it in the air;
neither can one learn the theory of grammar without learning
an actual language, or learn to argue and orate without
speaking about something in particular. The debating
subjects of the Middle Ages were drawn largely from
Theology, or from the Ethics and History of Antiquity.
Often, indeed, they became stereotyped, especially towards
the end of the period, and the far-fetched and wire-drawn
absurdities of scholastic argument fretted Milton and
provide food for merriment even to this day. Whether they
were in themselves any more hackneyed and trivial than the
usual subjects set nowadays for "essay-writing" I should not
like to say: we may ourselves grow a little weary of "A Day
in my Holidays," "What I should like to Do when I Leave
School," and all the rest of it. But most of the merriment is
misplaced, because the aim and object of the debating thesis
has by now been lost sight of. A glib speaker in the Brains
Trust once entertained his audience (and reduced the late
Charles Williams to helpless rage) by asserting that in the
Middle Ages it was a matter of faith to know how many
archangels could dance on the point of a needle. I need not
say, I hope, that it never was a "matter of faith"; it was
simply a debating exercise, whose set subject was the nature
of angelic substance: were angels material, and if so, did
they occupy space? The answer usually adjudged correct is, I
believe, that angels are pure intelligences; not material,
but limited, so that they may have location in space but not
extension. An analogy might be drawn from human thought,
which is similarly non-material and similarly limited. Thus,
if your thought is concentrated upon one thing--say, the
point of a needle--it is located there in the sense that it
is not elsewhere; but although it is "there," it occupies no
space there, and there is nothing to prevent an infinite
number of different people's thoughts being concentrated
upon the same needle-point at the same time. The proper
subject of the argument is thus seen to be the distinction
between location and extension in space; the matter on which
the argument is exercised happens to be the nature of angels
(although, as we have seen, it might equally well have been
something else); the practical lesson to be drawn from the
argument is not to use words like "there" in a loose and
unscientific way, without specifying whether you mean
"located there" or "occupying space there." Scorn in plenty
has been poured out upon the mediaeval passion for
hair-splitting: but when we look at the shameless abuse
made, in print and on the platform, of controversial
expressions with shifting and ambiguous connotations, we may
feel it in our hearts to wish that every reader and hearer
had been so defensively armoured by his education as to be
able to cry: _Distinguo_.

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 scandalised 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 spell-binder, 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.

What, then, are we to do? We cannot go back to the Middle
Ages. That is a cry to which we have become accustomed. We
cannot go back--or can we? _Distinguo._ I should like every
term in that proposition defined. Does "Go back" mean a
retrogression in time, or the revision of an error? The
first is clearly impossible _per se_; the second is a thing
which wise men do every day. "Cannot"--does this mean that
our behaviour is determined by some irreversible cosmic
mechanism, or merely that such an action would be very
difficult in view of the opposition it would provoke? "The
Middle Ages "--obviously the 20th century is not and cannot
be the 14th; but if "the Middle Ages" is, in this context,
simply a picturesque phrase denoting a particular
educational theory, there seems to be no _a priori_ reason
why we should not "go back" to it--with modifications--as we
have already "gone back," with modifications, to, let us
say, the idea of playing Shakespeare's plays as he wrote
them, and not in the "modernised" versions of Cibber and
Garrick, which once seemed to be the latest thing in
theatrical progress.

Let us amuse ourselves by imagining that such progressive
retrogression is possible. Let us make a clean sweep of all
educational authorities, and furnish ourselves with a nice
little school of boys and girls whom we may experimentally
equip for the intellectual conflict along lines chosen by
ourselves. We will endow them with exceptionally docile
parents; we will staff our school with teachers who are
themselves perfectly familiar with the aims and methods of
the Trivium; we will have our buildings and staff large
enough to allow our classes to be small enough for adequate
handling; and we will postulate a Board of Examiners willing
and qualified to test the products we turn out. Thus
prepared, we will attempt to sketch out a syllabus--a modern
Trivium "with modifications"; and we will see where we get
to.

But first: what age shall the children be? Well, if one is
to educate them on novel lines, it will be better that they
should have nothing to unlearn; besides, one cannot begin a
good thing too early, and the Trivium is by its nature not
learning, but a preparation for learning. We will,
therefore, "catch 'em young," requiring only of our pupils
that they shall be able to read, write and cipher.

My views about child-psychology are, I admit, neither
orthodox nor enlightened. Looking back upon myself (since I
am the child I know best and the only child I can pretend to
know from inside) I recognise in myself three stages of
development. These, in a rough-and-ready fashion, I will
call the Poll-parrot, the Pert, and the Poetic--the latter
coinciding, approximately, with the onset of puberty. The
Poll-parrot stage is the one in which learning by heart is
easy and, on the whole, pleasurable; whereas reasoning is
difficult and, on the whole, little relished. At this age,
one readily memorises the shapes and appearances of things;
one likes to recite the number-plates of cars; one rejoices
in the chanting of rhymes and the rumble and thunder of
unintelligible polysyllables; one enjoys the mere
accumulation of things. The Pert Age, which follows upon
this (and, naturally, overlaps it to some extent) is only
too familiar to all who have to do with children: it is
characterised by contradicting, answering-back, liking to
"catch people out" (especially one's elders) and in the
propounding of conundrums (especially the kind with a nasty
verbal catch in them). Its nuisance-value is extremely high.
It usually sets in about the Lower Fourth. The Poetic Age is
popularly known as the "difficult" age. It is self-centred;
it yearns to express itself; it rather specialises in being
misunderstood; it is restless and tries to achieve
independence; and, with good luck and good guidance, it
should show the beginnings of creativeness, a reaching-out
towards a synthesis of what it already knows, and a
deliberate eagerness to know and do some one thing in
preference to all others. Now it seems to me that the
lay-out of the Trivium adapts itself with a singular
appropriateness to these three ages: Grammar to the
Poll-parrot, Dialectic to the Pert, and Rhetoric to the
Poetic age.

Let us begin, then, with Grammar. This, in practice, means
the grammar of some language in particular; and it must be
an inflected language. The grammatical structure of an
uninflected language is far too analytical to be tackled by
any one without previous practice in Dialectic. Moreover,
the inflected languages interpret the uninflected, whereas
the uninflected are of little use in interpreting the
inflected. I will say at once, quite firmly, that the best
grounding for education is the Latin grammar. I say this,
not because Latin is traditional and mediaeval, but simply
because even a rudimentary knowledge of Latin cuts down the
labour and pains of learning almost any other subject by at
least fifty per cent. It is the key to the vocabulary and
structure of all the Romance languages and to the structure
of all the Teutonic languages, as well as to the technical
vocabulary of all the sciences and to the literature of the
entire Mediterranean civilisation, together with all its
historical documents. Those whose pedantic preference for a
living language persuades them to deprive their pupils of
all these advantages might substitute Russian, whose grammar
is still more primitive. (The verb is complicated by a
number of "aspects"--and I rather fancy that it enjoys three
complete voices and a couple of extra aorists--but I may be
thinking of Basque or Sanskrit.) Russian is, of course,
helpful with the other Slav dialects. There is something
also to be said for Classical Greek. But my own choice is
Latin. Having thus pleased the Classicists among you, I will
proceed to horrify them by adding that I do not think it
either wise or necessary to cramp the ordinary pupil upon
the Procrustean bed of the Augustan age, with its highly
elaborate and artificial verse-forms and oratory. The
post-classical and mediaeval Latin, which was a living
language down to the end of the Renaissance, is easier and
in some ways livelier, both in syntax and rhythm; and a
study of it helps to dispel the widespread notion that
learning and literature came to a full-stop when Christ was
born and only woke up again at the Dissolution of the
Monasteries.

However, I am running ahead too fast. We are still in the
grammatical stage. Latin should be begun as early as
possible--at a time when inflected speech seems no more
astonishing than any other phenomenon in an astonishing
world; and when the chanting of "amo, amas, amat" is as
ritually agreeable to the feelings as the chanting of "eeny,
meeny, miney, mo."

During this age we must, of course, exercise the mind on
other things besides Latin grammar. Observation and memory
are the faculties most lively at this period; and if we are
to learn a contemporary foreign language we should begin
now, before the facial and mental muscles become rebellious
to strange intonations. Spoken French or German can be
practised alongside the grammatical discipline of the Latin.

In _English_, verse and prose can be learned by heart, and
the pupil's memory should be stored with stories of every
kind--classical myth, European legend, and so forth. I do
not think that the Classical stories and masterpieces of
ancient literature should be made the vile bodies on which
to practise the technics of Grammar--that was a fault of
mediaeval education which we need not perpetuate. The
stories can be enjoyed and remembered in English, and
related to their origin at a subsequent stage. Recitation
aloud should be practised--individually or in chorus; for we
must not forget that we are laying the ground work for
Disputation and Rhetoric.

The grammar of _History_ should consist, I think, of dates,
events, anecdotes and personalities. A set of dates to which
one can peg all later historical knowledge is of enormous
help later on in establishing the perspective of history. It
does not greatly matter _which_ dates: those of the Kings
of England will do very nicely, provided that they are
accompanied by pictures of costume, architecture, and other
"every-day things," so that the mere mention of a date
calls up a strong visual presentment of the whole period.

_Geography_ will similarly be presented in its factual
aspect, with maps, natural features and visual presentment
of customs, costumes, flora, fauna and so on; and I believe
myself that the discredited and old-fashioned memorising of
a few capital cities, rivers, mountain ranges, etc., does no
harm. Stamp-collecting may be encouraged.

_Science_, in the Poll-parrot period, arranges itself
naturally and easily round collections--the identifying and
naming of specimens and, in general, the kind of thing that
used to be called "natural history," or, still more
charmingly, "natural philosophy." To know the names and
properties of things is, at this age, a satisfaction in
itself; to recognise a devil's coach-horse at sight, and
assure one's foolish elders that, in spite of its
appearance, it does not sting; to be able to pick out
Cassiopeia and the Pleiades, and possibly even to know who
Cassiopeia and the Pleiades were; to be aware that a whale
is not a fish, and a bat not a bird--all these things give a
pleasant sensation of superiority; while to know a
ring-snake from an adder or a poisonous from an edible
toadstool is a kind of knowledge that has also a practical
value.

The grammar of _Mathematics_ begins, of course, with the
multiplication table, which, if not learnt now will never be
learnt with pleasure; and with the recognition of
geometrical shapes and the grouping of numbers. These
exercises lead naturally to the doing of simple sums in
arithmetic; and if the pupil shows a bent that way, a
facility acquired at this stage is all to the good. More
complicated mathematical processes may, and perhaps should,
be postponed, for reasons which will presently appear.

So far (except, of course, for the Latin), our curriculum
contains nothing that departs very far from common practice.
The difference will be felt rather in the attitude of the
teachers, who must look upon all these activities less as
"subjects" in themselves than as a gathering-together of
_material_ for use in the next part of the Trivium. What
that material actually is, is only of secondary importance;
but it is as well that anything and everything which can
usefully be committed to memory should be memorised at this
period, whether it is immediately intelligible or not. The
modern tendency is to try and force rational explanations on
a child's mind at too early an age. Intelligent questions,
spontaneously asked, should, of course, receive an immediate
and rational answer; but it is a great mistake to suppose
that a child cannot readily enjoy and remember things that
are beyond its power to analyse--particularly if those
things have a strong imaginative appeal (as, for example,
_Kubla Khan_), an attractive jingle (like some of the
memory-rhymes for Latin genders), or an abundance of rich,
resounding polysyllables (like the _Quicunque Vult_).

This reminds me of the Grammar of _Theology_. I shall add
it to the curriculum, because Theology is the
mistress-science, without which the whole educational
structure will necessarily lack its final synthesis. Those
who disagree about this will remain content to leave their
pupils' education still full of loose ends. This will matter
rather less than it might, since by the time that the tools
of learning have been forged the student will be able to
tackle Theology for himself, and will probably insist upon
doing so and making sense of it. Still, it is as well to
have this matter also handy and ready for the reason to work
upon. At the grammatical age, therefore, we should become
acquainted with the story of God and Man in
outline--_i.e._, the Old and New Testament presented as
parts of a single narrative of Creation, Rebellion and
Redemption--and also with "the Creed, the Lord's Prayer and
the Ten Commandments." At this stage, it does not matter
nearly so much that these things should be fully understood
as that they should be known and remembered. Remember, it is
material that we are collecting.

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
(or, as a schoolmaster correspondent of mine more elegantly
puts it: "When the capacity for abstract thought begins to
manifest itself"). 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 fallen into a habit of
supposing that we are conditioned almost entirely by the
intuitive and the unconscious. There is no time now to argue
whether this is true; I will content myself with observing
that to neglect the proper training of the reason is the
best possible way to make it true, and to ensure the
supremacy of the intuitive, irrational and unconscious
elements in our make-up. A secondary cause for the disfavour
into which Formal 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. But even if they
were, it would make no difference, since every syllogism
whose major premise is in the form " All A is B " can be
recast in hypothetical form. Logic is the art of arguing
correctly: "If A, then B"; the method is not invalidated by
the hypothetical character of A. Indeed, the practical
utility of Formal Logic to-day 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 finger-tips;
henceforward we can concentrate more particularly on Syntax
and Analysis (_i.e._, the logical construction of speech)
and the history of Language (_i.e._, how we came to arrange
our speech as we do in order to convey our thoughts).

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.

_Mathematics_--Algebra, Geometry, and the more advanced
kind of Arithmetic--will now enter into the syllabus and
take its place as what it really is: not a separate
"subject" but a sub-department of Logic. 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 behaviour 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.e., the rational structure of Christian
thought), clarifying the relations between the dogma and the
ethics, and lending itself to that application of ethical
principles in particular instances which is properly called
casuistry. _Geography_ and the _Sciences_ will all
likewise provide material for Dialectic.

But above all, we must not neglect the material which is so
abundant in the pupils' own daily life. There is a
delightful passage in Leslie Paul's _The Living Hedge_
which tells how a number of small boys enjoyed themselves
for days arguing about an extraordinary shower of rain which
had fallen in their town--a shower so localised that it left
one half of the main street wet and the other dry. 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 definition of terms and exactness
of statement. All events are food for such an appetite. An
umpire's decision; the degree to which one may transgress
the spirit of a regulation without being trapped by the
letter; on such questions as these, children are born
casuists, and their natural propensity only needs to be
developed and trained--and, especially, brought into an
intelligible relationship with events in the grown-up world.
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 muddle-headed argument, 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
per cent.

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
canalised 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. The
teachers, to be sure, will have to mind their step, or they
may get more than they bargained for. All children sit in
judgment on their masters; and if the Chaplain's sermon or
the Headmistress's annual Speech-day address should by any
chance afford an opening for the point of the critical
wedge, that wedge will go home the more forcibly under the
weight of the Dialectical hammer, wielded by a practised
hand. That is why I said that the teachers themselves would
need to undergo the discipline of the Trivium before they
set out to impose it on their charges.

Once again: the contents of the syllabus at this stage may
be anything you like. The "subjects" supply material; but
they are all to be regarded as mere grist for the mental
mill to work upon. The pupils should be encouraged to go and
forage for their own information, and so guided towards the
proper use of libraries and books of 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
re-awaken, 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 analysed 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
realisation that a 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 that already shows a
disposition to specialise 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. Indeed, at this stage, our
difficulty will be to keep "subjects" apart; for as
Dialectic will have shown all branches of learning to be
inter-related, so Rhetoric will tend to show that all
knowledge is one. 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 specialise 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. Generally speaking:
whatsoever is _mere_ apparatus may now be allowed to fall
into the background, while the trained mind is gradually
prepared for specialisation in the "subjects" which, when
the Trivium is completed, it should be perfectly well
equipped to tackle on its own. The final synthesis of the
Trivium--the presentation and public defence of the
thesis--should be restored in some form; perhaps as a kind
of "leaving examination" during the last term at school.

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 public school and/or university. Since,
really, Rhetoric should be taken at about 14, the first
category of pupil should study Grammar from about 9 to 11,
and Dialectic from 12 to 14; his last two school years would
then be devoted to Rhetoric, which, in his case, would be of
a fairly specialised and vocational kind, suiting him to
enter immediately upon some practical career. A pupil of the
second category would finish his Dialectical course in his
Preparatory School, and take Rhetoric during his first two
years at his Public School. At 16, he would be ready to
start upon those "subjects" which are proposed for his later
study at the university: and this part of his education will
correspond to the mediaeval Quadrivium. What this amounts to
is that the ordinary pupil, whose formal education ends at
16, will take the Trivium only; whereas scholars will take
both Trivium and Quadrivium.

Is the Trivium, then, a sufficient education for life?
Properly taught, I believe that it should be. At the end of
the Dialectic, the children will probably seem to be far
behind their coaevals brought up on old-fashioned "modern"
methods, so far as detailed knowledge of specific subjects
is concerned. But after the age of 14 they should be able to
overhaul the others hand over fist. Indeed, I am not at all
sure that a pupil thoroughly proficient in the Trivium would
not be fit to proceed immediately to the university at the
age of 16, thus proving himself the equal of his mediaeval
counterpart, whose precocity astonished us at the beginning
of this discussion. This, to be sure, would make hay of the
public-school system, and disconcert the universities very
much--it would, for example, make quite a different thing of
the Oxford and Cambridge Boat-race. But I am not here to
consider the feelings of academic bodies: I am concerned
only with the proper training of the mind to encounter and
deal with the formidable mass of undigested problems
presented to it by the modern world. For the tools of
learning are the same, in any and every subject; and the
person who knows how to use them will, at any age, get the
mastery of a new subject in half the time and with a quarter
of the effort expended by the person who has not the tools
at his command. To learn six subjects without remembering
how they were learnt does nothing to ease the approach to a
seventh; to have learnt and remembered the art of learning
makes the approach to every subject an open door.

It is clear that the successful teaching of this
neo-mediaeval curriculum will depend even more than usual
upon the working together of the whole teaching staff
towards a common purpose. Since no subject is considered as
an end in itself, any kind of rivalry in the staff-room will
be sadly out of place. The fact that a pupil is,
unfortunately, obliged, for some reason, to miss the History
period on Fridays, or the Shakespeare class on Tuesdays, or
even to omit a whole subject in favour of some other
subject, must not be allowed to cause any
heart-burnings--the essential is that he should acquire the
method of learning in whatever medium suits him best. If
human nature suffers under this blow to one's professional
pride in one's own subject, there is comfort in the thought
that the end-of-term examination results will not be
affected; for the papers will be so arranged as to be an
examination in method, by whatever means.

I will add that it is highly important that every teacher
should, for his or her own sake, be qualified and required
to teach in all three parts of the Trivium; otherwise the
Masters of Dialectic, especially, might find their minds
hardening into a permanent adolescence. For this reason,
teachers in Preparatory Schools should also take Rhetoric
classes in the Public Schools to which they are attached;
or, if they are not so attached, then by arrangement in
other schools in the same neighbourhood. Alternatively, a
few preliminary classes in Rhetoric might be taken in
Preparatory Schools from the age of 13 onwards.

Before concluding these necessarily very sketchy
suggestions, I ought to say why I think it necessary, in
these days, to go back to a discipline which we had
discarded. The truth is that for the last 300 years or so we
have been living upon our educational capital. The
post-Renaissance world, bewildered and excited by the
profusion of new "subjects" offered to it, broke away from
the old discipline (which had, indeed, become sadly dull and
stereotyped in its practical application) and imagined that
henceforward it could, as it were, disport itself happily in
its new and extended Quadrivium without passing through the
Trivium. But the scholastic tradition, though broken and
maimed, still lingered in the public schools and
universities: Milton, however much he protested against it,
was formed by it--the debate of the Fallen Angels, and the
disputation of Abdiel with Satan have the tool-marks of the
Schools upon them, and might, incidentally, profitably
figure as set passages for our Dialectical studies. Right
down to the 19th century, our public affairs were mostly
managed, and our books and journals were for the most part
written, by people brought up in homes, and trained in
places, where that tradition was still alive in the memory
and almost in the blood. Just so, many people to-day who are
atheist or agnostic in religion, are governed in their
conduct by a code of Christian ethics which is so rooted in
their unconscious assumptions that it never occurs to them
to question it. But one cannot live on capital for ever. A
tradition, however firmly rooted, if it is never watered,
though it dies hard, yet in the end it dies. And to-day 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.




Transcriber's note:

The edition used as base for this book contained the
following errors, which have been corrected:

    Page 11: and all the rest of it But most of the merriment
    => and all the rest of it. But most of the merriment

    Page 27: his arst two years at his Public School
    => his first two years at his Public School

    Page 52: overhaul the others hand over first
    => overhaul the others hand over fist


[End of _The Lost Tools of Learning_ by Dorothy L. Sayers]