The Lost Tools of Learning :: Teaching Education

The Lost Tools of LearningThe Lost Tools of Learning was premiere presented by Dorothy Sayers at Oxford in 1947. It is copyrighted by National Review, one hundred fifty East 35th Street, New York, NY 10016, and reproduced here with their permission. That I, whose experience of teaching is exceedingly limited, should presume to discuss education is a matter, surely, that calls for no apology. It is a change of behavior to which the present climate of opinion is wholly favorable. Bishops air their opinions slightly economics biologists, about metaphysics inorganic chemists, about theology the most hostile people be 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 the the criticisms are made with a reasonable modesty, these activities are commendable. Too much specialization is not a good thing. thither is also one excellent reason why the veriest amateu r may feel entitled to nurse an opinion about education. For if we are not all professional teachers, we have all, at some time or another, been taught. Even if we learnt nothing--perhaps in particular if we learnt nothing--our contribution to the discussion may have a potential value. However, it is in the highest degree improbable that the reforms I shoot for will ever be carried into effect. Neither the parents, nor the training colleges, nor the examination boards, nor the boards of governors, nor the ministries of education, would advocate them for a moment. For they amount to this that if we are to produce a society of improve people, fitted to preserve their intellectual freedom amid the complex pressures of our modern society, we must tour back the wheel of progress some four or flipper hundred years, to the point at which education began to lose sight of its veritable object, towards the end of the Middle Ages. Before you dismiss me with the appropriate phrase--reac tionary, romantic, mediaevalist, laudator temporis acti (praiser of clock past), or whatever tag comes first to hand--I will ask you to knock over 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 university in, let us say, Tudor times, and thereafter were held fit to assume business for the conduct of their own affairs, are we altogether comfortable about that synthetic prolongation of intellectual childhood and adolescence into the years of physical maturity which is so marked in our own day?