That one essay – you know the one that got this whole educational renewal movement going – needs to be reevaluated. I am talking about the essay “The Lost Tools of Learning” by Dorothy Sayers. Her approach reminds me of Galadriel’s speech in the prologue to The Lord of the Rings movies, “Much that once was is lost. For none now live who remember it.” Someone who remembers the way things were must pass that knowledge down or else it is forever lost to the detriment of future generations. “And some things that should not have been forgotten were lost.”
Previous article in the series, Human Development:
Part 1: What Do You Have in Mind?
Dorothy Sayers and the Lost Classical Tradition
Although not properly a member of the Inklings – the informal literary society gathered around Tolkien and Lewis – Dorothy Sayers was an esteemed member of the British literati in her day and frequently shared her works with Lewis and Tolkien. Best known for her detective novels, Sayers was likewise a first-rate essayist, critic and scholar. She was among the group of women upon whom degrees were first granted at Oxford in 1920. Her writings rarely directly address education, although learned figures like Lord Peter Wimsey and Harriet Vane opine from time to time on the subject. It was in 1947 that Sayers addressed an audience in Oxford on the subject of education, a presentation later published under the title “The Lost Tools of Learning.” It wasn’t until the 1990s that her educational vision took hold, and then not in her native England, but in America of all places.
At the heart of her address is a maneuver to map the medieval trivium upon three stages of development. The trivium denotes three of the seven liberal arts (grammar, logic and rhetoric), or what we might call the language arts. Our educational renewal movement has devoted much attention to figuring out what these three arts are and how to teach them effectively. Sayers refers to three stages of development, designating them as the Poll-parrot stage (the youngest learners), the Pert stage (middle grades), and the Poetic stage (after puberty sets in). This designation directly led to classical schools adopting titles such as Grammar school (usually Kindergarten through grade five or six), Logic school (grades five or six through eight) and Rhetoric school (high school), for better or worse. This pairing of the liberal arts trivium and stages of development became so powerful within the classical education movement that it is common to find school websites that describe the trivium as the learning stages of children.
A Critique of Sayers’ Stages
In his 2019 article “Dorothy Sayers Was Wrong: The Trivium and Child Development” on the Circe Institute blog, Shawn Barnett challenges Sayers’ correlation of the trivium and stages of child development. He rightly identifies how Sayers was responding to the state of educational reform that overly focused on teaching facts in more specialized subject areas. Elsewhere I have referred to and critiqued the factory model of education (particularly as developed in Seth Godin’s book Linchpin), and inasmuch as this was what Sayers was responding to, we have found her to be helpful in our day to formulate a renewal of education along classical lines. I share Barnett’s concern that we not be so overly reactionary to the state of conventional education that we warp our understanding of what classical education is.
Despite Sayers’ clarion call to rediscover the lost tools of learning – that is the classical liberal arts – Barnett takes to task her developmental stages understanding of the trivium as anachronistic. Barnett writes, “medieval educational theorists never conceived of the trivium in terms of developmental stages that roughly correspond to a student’s age.” He correctly assesses the ahistorical nature of her essay in that childhood stages of development were never in view during the Middle Ages. He further rightly points out that most of the trivium was taught to university students, not to children. I leave aside Barnett’s discussion of Medieval curriculum as I am certain he is correct that we must take special care to select the best texts for our curricular content. I don’t know that Sayers would disagree with this point. My sense is that Sayers was less interested in spelling out specifically what children should read at what age, but instead giving general guidance that the liberal arts trivium is the answer to the problem of an overly specialized model of education that emerged after WWII with undue focus on technicism and scientism. Medieval education never thought of education in developmental terms, and Barnett demonstrates that Sayers’ is completely anachronistic on this point.
Yet where I think Barnett’s critique misses the mark is that the punchline of Sayers’ joke is exactly that it is anachronistic. We can hear even in her naming of the stages of childhood (Poll-parot, Pert, Poet) an element of humor or levity. Her appeal to the old guard Oxonians in her audience is that the antiquated trivium can be dusted off to meet the needs of modern education. She is not calling us to return to the Middle Ages. When we truly understand the Western cultural heritage as something like open source software, there are ways we can update something like the trivium today. Keep in mind that the Medieval version of the trivium as it existed in the universities was an updated version harking back to the classical era. In fact when we attempt to identify exactly what we are talking about when we look for a classical analogue, we are really looking at a centuries old tradition that grew, developed and changed in a dynamic relationship with the prevailing culture of the eras in which it existed.
What Sayers provides through her anachronistic paring of the trivium and child development theory is an attempt to link the deep magic of the classical liberal arts tradition with the cutting edge of modern research. One can clearly see the influence of Piaget in Sayer’s thinking. Piaget’s breakthrough work on child cognitive development was first published in French in 1936 and then translated into English in 1952. Because his work corresponded roughly to Rousseau’s four stages of child development in Emile (1762), Piaget’s ideas spread fairly rapidly. Yet Sayers never refers to Piaget, nor Rousseau for that matter. Her three-part schema seems not to be based on Piaget’s four-part schema, but this may be more down to her desire to fit the schema to the trivium than a lack of awareness of the Rousseau/Piaget four-part schema.
Piaget’s work on childhood cognitive development was the cutting edge science of Sayers’ day. So one major take away from her essay has to do with the nature of her argument. For the classical liberal arts to inform and influence education today, it must be conversant with modern research. In hindsight, we can see how there is a tension between the classical tradition and advances in research. Yet, that tension enables us to explore the ways we can gain insights into the craft of teaching. To that end, let’s examine further Piaget’s theory of childhood cognitive development and the ways it influences neurobiology and cognitive science today.
Piaget and His Stages of Development
The basic theory of cognitive development moves through four stages. The first stage is the sensorimotor stage from birth to two. The infant uses basic reflexes to interact with the world, establishing sets of habits in reaction to various stimuli or bodily functions. Some of the cognitive traits initiated in the first stage are understanding object permanence and gaining a sense of curiosity surrounding novelties. The second stage is called the preoperational stage, beginning when the child learns basic speech patterns. Children begin to play and pretend during this stage. They also ask lots of questions, sponging up knowledge through those close to them. The third stage begins around the age of seven. The concrete operational stage finds children developing the skill of logic, particularly inductive reasoning. The fourth stage, called the formal operational stage, begins around the age of eleven. Children in this stage are able to think abstractly, solving multifactorial problems and monitor their own learning.
So far we can see how Piaget’s four-stage theory corresponds somewhat to the kind of schema Sayers proposed as the trivium stages. However, we can add a few layers of complexity to what Piaget understood about these stages. To begin with, children progress through these stages at different rates. It is not as though every child upon turning seven automatically enters the concrete operational stage. What Piaget was really after in his research was not entirely about the four stages, but the mechanisms that enabled a child to develop cognitively. He saw that a child responded to new challenges by updating old schemas to assimilate new knowledge. However, there comes a point where a child makes a shift to respond to complexities of newly assimilated knowledge and updates her entire schema. For instance, an infant is able to assimilate a massive amount of information just through physically manipulating objects. But there comes a point when the child alters her schema because physical manipulation is insufficient to assimilate certain kinds of new knowledge. Language is required because of the insufficiency of motor operation, and the child updates her schema, moving into the preoperational stage. This does not mean that the sensorimotor method of learning goes away. Instead, the newly accommodated way of learning expands the aperture of knowledge receptors.
It should also be pointed out that abstract thought is not absent in children before turning seven. It is not uncommon for Piaget’s stages to be described as a concrete stage followed by an abstract stage. In Piaget’s use of the word “operate” or “operational” he is conveying that a child is capable of systematizing thought in the best mode possible for that stage. So the infant is systematizing thought about the physical world by putting objects in her mouth and banging them on the tile floor. When we think about the realm of the abstract, it is clear that children are able to have abstract thoughts, it is just that the ability to systematize abstract concepts has not yet become the dominant schema for their thinking.
There are some key concepts Piaget developed as hallmarks of cognitive development. We begin with decentering. A child is decentering when she is able to pay attention to multiple attributes of the same object. Children younger than three or four can become fixated on only one attribute of an object. Once children are able to decenter, they can hold in their mind multiple aspects of something. This cognitive skill is essential to reading. When we read, we see the letter symbols grouped together. By decentering we can simultaneously see that these symbols form words and phrases that carry meaning. Next is conservation. The concept of conservation involves the ability to recognize a quantity remains the same even when transformed in different situations. For instance, the amount of orange juice remains the same when poured from a tall, skinny glass into a short, wide glass. Children gain the ability of conservation usually by age seven. Finally, reversibility is the concept that an object can be restored to its original condition after being transformed. For instance, if you take a cookie out of the cookie jar (subtraction), you can restore the original state by returning a cookie to the cookie jar. A child that has the ability of reversibility can understand series of events and how to move forward or backward through that series. Like conservation, this ability emerges around the age of seven.
Gleaning from Piaget’s work, we can draw a few postulates about child cognitive development. First, Piaget provides a way for us to think about the mind of the child from the perspective of the child, meaning we are not evaluating a child’s cognitive abilities as lesser or slower than adult cognitive ability. In fact, there are cognitive process that are rather faster and more adept than adult cognitive ability. Take language as a case in point. Children acquire their native language more rapidly and with greater fluency than most adults acquire a second language. So, the cognitive ability of the child is not a diminution of grown-up cognitive ability, it is actually a cognitive ability unto itself.
Second, Piaget gives us certain hallmarks that are present at different stages. We can observe a toddler banging pots together with an understanding that the child is actually thinking at a deep level about his little universe. Students in, say, Middle School are not only learning about different subjects, they are also gaining mastery of executive function. Can they follow sets of instructions to solve equations, write a paper, and turn in work on time fully completed?
Third, Piaget’s layout of the developmental stages shows educators that learning is dependent on and constrained by developmental processes. At a certain level, this is intuitive. John Milton Gregory in his Seven Laws of Teaching establishes the principle that the unknown should be built upon the known. This idea is consistent with the notion that new learning should be built upon the structures of the child’s operational abilities.
Piaget’s theories have undergone transformations since he first proposed his stages. Among the greatest criticisms of his theory is that the basic theory is at best a heuristic guide to general development, but when applied as a structural whole, it misses the nuances of development. Today developmental theory views cognitive development as a modular system, with different parts of the mind operate independently. So an advance in reading skill based on cognitive development does not mean that the same child will experience an equivalent advance in number sense. However, in general terms, there are elements of neuroscience that bear out the basic heuristic of his theory. For instance, our understanding of how the brain develops during the first year of life shows how at a neurological level there are parts of the brain that get connected together, substantially leading to new cognitive capabilities. In infants, the number and quality of neurons linking the prefrontal cortex is limited so that those early years are marked by unhindered curiosity and exploration. When the neurological links are strengthened through the process of myelination, the prefrontal cortex can take on a stronger role in formal thinking which has the effect of inhibiting or restraining curiosity and exploration. Biological factors such as this go some way toward explaining some of the passage through Piaget’s stages.
The dictum that “neurons that fire together wire together” provide insight into cognitive development and also indicate potential pedagogical strategies. What we’ve learned through neuroscience is that the brain grows new neurons, prunes old neurons and myelinates neurons that are repeatedly used. Myelination is the process of wrapping neurons in a fatty substance that helps it fire faster due to increased conductivity. This is the basic theory of neuroplasticity. The brain you have now is not the brain you had yesterday, nor the brain you will have tomorrow. That is IF you develop new habits or make changes in your behaviors. Essentially, your brain wants to conserve effort and will prune neurons it no longer needs and protect the ones it consistently uses. Yet, the environment bombards the brain with new information that forces the brain to constantly evaluate what needs to be kept, discarded and protected. This goes some way towards explaining the physical processes behind cognitive growth even into adulthood.
Reappropriating Dorothy Sayers
Having taken a bit of a deep dive into Piaget, it is worth returning to the basic contours of her essay “The Lost Tools of Learning.” If we take the thrust of her argument seriously then we must heed the call to recover that which was lost and use it effectively today. She uses the analogy of “tools” to describe the liberal arts. Our educational renewal movement has done a decent job dusting off the old books and implementing them so that students are once again reading the great books, learning the Western cultural heritage, translating Latin and Greek, examining logic and gaining rhetorical skill. Genuine practice of the liberal arts is raising up a generation of students truly empowered to lead our churches and societies. For this I am grateful to Dorothy Sayers for planting the seed in her essay that would blossom into classical Christian education today.
As I have wrestled with her essay over the years I have seen the inadequacy of the three-stage developmental schema she mapped out for the trivium. For one, the trivium really should not be thought of as stages of development. It was a few years ago now that Jason Barney proposed a twofold understanding of the liberal arts. He wrote:
“This leads me to propose a twofold understanding of grammar, dialectic and rhetoric. Each is both an art and a science, both a complex skill of communication and a traditional body of knowledge about that area.”
The liberal arts are neither developmental stages nor are they mere subjects. The reduction of the liberal arts to subjects is likewise problematic.
“If you look at many of our textbooks in grammar, logic or rhetoric, you have to admit that the method of the textbook seems to assume that the goal is primarily to teach our students knowledge about these ‘subjects,’ as if that were enough.”
The danger of this approach is that students acquire the “right” answers as they gain mastery of the subject materials, but have they become well practiced in the art of grammar, logic and rhetoric? This is the genius of Jason’s proposal, that the subject matter informs masterful practice of the art and masterful practice more deeply ingrains the subject matter. The liberal arts conceived of by Sayers as tools means we must have a good knowledge of what the tools of learning are, but we must also be able to use the tools of learning effectively.
This is where my reflection on childhood cognitive development comes into play. As we teachers reflect on the craft of teaching, it is essential to understand the science of how the minds of children are developing. Sayers in a rudimentary way points the way forward for how we can implement the liberal arts for today. It is not that the liberal arts get locked into particular stages of development. Instead, we must gain a sensitivity to how the learning and practicing of the liberal arts matches the emerging cognitive abilities of the children in our classrooms.
Here in the second part of this series we have covered a lot of theoretical ground. So in the last part of this series the goal is to give due consideration to implementation. There are ways in which we can use the science of today to inform best practices as we recover the lost tools of learning.
Previous article in the series, Human Development: