The Lost Tools of Learning :: Teaching Education

The Lost likewisels of LearningThe Lost Tools of Learning was first presented by Dorothy Sayers at Oxford in 1947. It is copyrighted by National Review, 150 eastmost 35th Street, New York, NY 10016, and reproduced here with their permission. That I, whose experience of teaching is extremely limited, should arrogate to discuss education is a matter, surely, that c al singles for no apology. It is a kind of deportment to which the present climate of opinion is wholly favorable. Bishops air their opinions about economic science biologists, about metaphysics inorganic chemists, about theology the most irrelevant pack are appointed to highly technical ministries and plain, blunt men economise 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 comm finisable. Too much specialization is not a good thing. There is in any case one excellent reason why the veriest amateur may odour entitled to have an opinion about education. For if we are not solely professional teachers, we have all, at some time or another, been taught. fifty-fifty 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 propose provide 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 countenance them for a moment. For they amount to this that if we are to produce a society of educated people, fitted to deal their intellectual freedom amid the complex pressures of our modern society, we must turn corroborate the wheel of progress some four or five cytosine years, to the point at which education began to lose sight of its true object, towards the end of the Middle Ages. Before you dismiss me with the appropriate phrase--reactionary, romantic, mediaevalist, laudator temporis acti (praiser of times past), or whatever tag comes first to hand--I will ask you to consider 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, allow us say, Tudor times, and thereafter were held fit to assume responsibility for the transport of their own affairs, are we altogether comfortable about that artificial sequel of intellectual childhood and adolescence into the years of physical maturity which is so marked in our own day?