The Classical Notion of Self-Education for Today

In her lecture at Oxford in 1947, Dorothy Sayers remarked, “Is it not the great defect of our education today, 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.” Here we observe the seedlings of the classical Christian renewal movement: the distinction between training students how to think versus what to think. Sayers’ diagnosis is that schools in her day had prioritized learning subjects over

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