PDF "Dorothy L. Sayers was the most significant female British ...

"Dorothy L. Sayers was the most significant female British Christian intellectual of the twentieth century... she made a substantial impact on nearly as many fields as G.K. Chesterton or C.S. Lewis." - Touchstone Magazine

The Lost Tools

of LEARNING

The Lost Tools of Learning

By Dorothy L. Sayers

Introduction by Dell Cook

Headmaster, Cary Christian School

Paper read by Dorothy Sayers at Oxford University in 1947. Reprinted with the kind permission of David Higham Associates, London, UK, for distribution through the Cary Christian School website ().

Introduction copyright ? 2016 by Cary Christian School

Cover photo ? Soloviova Liudmyla /

Cover design, page design, and typesetting by Halbrook Designs

Contents

Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1 by Dell Cook

The Lost Tools of Learning. . . . . . .4 by Dorothy L. Sayers

About Dorothy Sayers. . . . . . . . . . . 35 About Cary Christian School. . . 36

Introduction

At any given moment, on any given college or university campus anywhere in the world, one can find a symposium, lecture, or conference put on by any number of think tanks, departments, or societies. Typically, the lectures presented at these gatherings make as much impact in the world as this morning's cereal. But on an evening in 1947, the British crime novelist, essayist, poet, and playwright Dorothy Sayers delivered a speech at Oxford University that has since generated a small revolution.

Sayers' essay, "The Lost Tools of Learning," is at once a lament and a wondering aloud. She laments the low and continuing degeneration of the modern educational enterprise while wondering to her listeners if, perhaps, the educational methodology that produced the modern western world might be recovered.

In her speech, Sayers' main thesis was that modern education had wandered astray from a goal of training students in the skills and arts of thinking and learning. Instead, the goal had become procurement of data, facts, and subject-specific content. The unfortunate result of this shift in emphasis is that students, in seeking only to learn the subject, not only do not learn the subject, they fail to learn how to learn anything. Additionally, they become less apt and able to make

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Introduction

connections of information, how to discern good reasoning from bad, and how to articulately express their thoughts in a cogent way. In short, we divest them of the ability to think and consequently, they become victims of the shoddy, lazy, or nefarious thinking of the age:

For 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. We who were scandalized in 1940 when men were sent to fight armored tanks with rifles, are not scandalized 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 hypnotized by the arts of the spell binder, we have the impudence to be astonished. We dole out lip-service to the importance of education 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; and yet, as I believe, all this devoted effort is largely frustrated, because we have lost the tools of learning, and

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