Tag: Dorothy Sayers

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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Human Development, Part 2: All the World’s a Stage

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.”

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Building Ratio: Training Students to Think and Learn for Themselves

In 1947, medievalist Dorothy Sayers took the podium at Oxford University and delivered a lecture that would launch a referendum on modern methods of education. It took time, to be sure, but from our current vantage point in 2020, there is no doubt that her words left a sizeable imprint on the current educational landscape. The Association of Classical Christian Schools (ACCS) reports the existence of hundreds of Christian, classical schools across the nation, many of which point to Sayers’ lecture as a source for both inspiration and guidance. What did Sayers share that day that elicited such a response

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Review of Recovering the Lost Tools of Learning by Douglas Wilson

Most people in the classical Christian school movement look upon Dorothy Sayer’s 1947 essay “The Lost Tools of Learning” as something of a founding document. However, the movement as it currently exists in North America stems from the implementation of that essay in the late 1980s, and is best represented in Douglas Wilson’s Recovering the Lost Tools of Learning (Crossway, 1991). Wilson had founded Logos School in Moscow, ID in 1981, a school that forms the backdrop to his book. Wilson would go on to help found the Association of Classical Christian Schools (ACCS) in 1993, which currently has over

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Venice, an iconic center of the Renaissance

Renaissance Education: Looking to the Past to Chart a Course for Education Today

Education in the Renaissance centered around a rediscovery of lost ideas leading to a rebirth of civilization. Looking back to Renaissance education provides insight into our own age as we reclaim the great texts and ideas lost over the past decades through waves of progressive educational reform. Rediscovering a World of Ideas Prior to the age of exploration, exploding into life after Columbus’s westward journey across the Atlantic in 1492, a different exploration of an unknown world occurred after the fall of Constantinople in 1453. For well over a millennium, the Byzantine empire was the eastern stronghold of Christendom, paralleling

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