Oxford, 1947
By DOROTHY L. SAYERS
E.T. HERON Publisher - First published in 1948
The bulk of this speech appeared as an article in the
Hibbert Journal: A Quarterly Review of Religion,
Theology, and Philosophy
Volume XLVI
October 1947–July 1948
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THE LOST TOOLS OF LEARNING
That I, whose experience of teaching is extremely limited, and whose life of recent years has been almost wholly out of touch with educational circles, should presume to discuss education is a matter, surely, that calls for no apology. It is a kind of behaviour to which the present climate of opinion is wholly favourable.
Bishops air their opinions about economics; biologists,
about metaphysics; celibates, about matrimony; inorganic chemists about
theology; the most irrelevant people are 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
that the criticisms are made with a reasonable modesty, these activities are
commendable. Too much specialisation is not a good thing. There is also one
excellent reason why the veriest amateur may feel entitled to have an opinion
about education. For if we are not all professional teachers, we have all,
at some time or other, been taught. Even if we learnt nothing—perhaps in
particular if we learnt nothing—our contribution to the discussion may have
a potential value.
Without apology, then, I will begin. But since much that I have to say is
highly controversial, it will be pleasant to start with a proposition with
which, I feel confident, all teachers will cordially agree; and that is, that they
all work much too hard and have far too many things to do. One has only to
look at any school or examination syllabus to see that it is cluttered up with
a great variety of exhausting subjects which they are called upon to teach,
and the teaching of which sadly interferes with what every thoughtful mind
will allow to be their proper duties, such as distributing milk, supervising
meals, taking cloak-room duty, weighing and measuring pupils, keeping
their eyes open for incipient mumps, measles and chicken-pox, making out
lists, escorting parties round the Victoria and Albert Museum, filling up
forms, interviewing parents, and devising end-of-term reports which shall
combine a deep veneration for truth with a tender respect for the feelings of
all concerned.
Upon these really important duties I will not enlarge. I propose only to deal
with the subject of teaching, properly so-called. I want to inquire whether,
amid all the multitudinous subjects which figure in the syllabuses, we are
really teaching the right things in the right way; and whether, by teaching
fewer things, differently, we might not succeed in “shedding the load” (as the
fashionable phrase goes) and, at the same time, producing a better result.
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This prospect need arouse neither hope nor alarm. It is in the highest degree
improbable that the reforms I propose will ever be carried into effect. Neither
the parents, nor the training colleges, nor the examination boards, nor the
boards of governors, nor the Ministry 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 preserve their intellectual freedom amid the
complex pressures of our modern society, we must turn back the wheel of
progress some four or five hundred 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, 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 the University in, let us say, Tudor times, and thereafter were
held fit to assume responsibility for the conduct of their own affairs, are
we altogether comfortable about that artificial prolongation of intellectual
childhood and adolescence into the years of physical maturity which is so
marked in our own day? To postpone the acceptance of responsibility to a late
date brings with it a number of psychological complications which, while they
may interest the psychiatrist, are scarcely beneficial either to the individual
or to society. The stock argument in favour of postponing the school leaving-
age and prolonging the period of education generally is that there is now so
much more to learn than there was in the Middle Ages. This is partly true,
but not wholly. The modern boy and girl are certainly taught more subjects—
but does that always mean that they are actually more learned and know
more? That is the very point which we are going to consider.
Has it ever struck you as odd, or unfortunate, that to-day, when the
proportion of literacy throughout Western Europe is higher than it has
ever been, people should have become susceptible to the influence of
advertisement and mass-propaganda to an extent hitherto unheard-of and
unimagined? Do you put this down to the mere mechanical fact that the press
and the radio and so on have made propaganda much easier to distribute
over a wide area? Or do you sometimes have an uneasy suspicion that the
product of modern educational methods is less good than he or she might be
at disentangling fact from opinion and the proven from the plausible?
Have you ever, in listening to a debate among adult and presumably
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responsible people, been fretted by the extraordinary inability of the average
debater to speak to the question, or to meet and refute the arguments of
speakers on the other side? Or have you ever pondered upon the extremely
high incidence of irrelevant matter which crops up at committee-meetings,
and upon the very great rarity of persons capable of acting as chairmen of
committees? And when you think of this, and think that most of our public
affairs are settled by debates and committees, have you ever felt a certain
sinking of the heart?
Have you ever followed a discussion in the newspapers or elsewhere and
noticed how frequently writers fail to define the terms they use? Or how
often, if one man does define his terms, another will assume in his reply that
he was using the terms in precisely the opposite sense to that in which he has
already defined them?
Have you ever been faintly troubled by the amount of slipshod syntax going
about? And if so, are you troubled because it is inelegant or because it may
lead to dangerous misunderstanding?
Do you ever find that young people, when they have left school, not only
forget most of what they have learnt (that is only to be expected) but forget
also, or betray that they have never really known, how to tackle a new
subject for themselves? Are you often bothered by coming across grown-up
men and women who seem unable to distinguish between a book that is
sound, scholarly and properly documented, and one that is to any trained
eye, very conspicuously none of these things? Or who cannot handle a library
catalogue? Or who, when faced with a book of reference, betray a curious
inability to extract from it the passages relevant to the particular question
which interests them?
Do you often come across people for whom, all their lives, a “subject” remains
a “subject,” divided by water-tight bulkheads from all other “subjects,” so
that they experience very great difficulty in making an immediate mental
connection between, let us say, algebra and detective fiction, sewage disposal
and the price of salmon, cellulose and the distribution of rainfall—or, more
generally, between such spheres of knowledge as philosophy and economics,
or chemistry and art?
Are you occasionally perturbed by the things written by adult men and
women for adult men and women to read? Here, for instance, is a quotation
from an evening paper. It refers to the visit of an Indian girl to this
country:—
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Miss Bhosle has a perfect command of English (“Oh, gosh,” she said
once), and a marked enthusiasm for London.
Well, we may all talk nonsense in a moment of inattention. It is more
alarming when we find a well-known biologist writing in a weekly paper to
the effect that: “It is an argument against the existence of a Creator” (I think
he put it more strongly; but since I have, most unfortunately, mislaid the
reference, I will put his claim at its lowest)—an “an argument against the
existence of a Creator that the same kind of variations which are produced by
natural selection can be produced at will by stock-breeders.” One might feel
tempted to say that it is rather an argument for the existence of a Creator.
Actually, of course, it is neither: all it proves is that the same material
causes (re-combination of the chromosomes by cross-breeding and so forth)
are sufficient to account for all observed variations—just as the various
combinations of the same 13 semitones are materially sufficient to account for
Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata and the noise the cat makes by walking on the
keys. But the cat’s performance neither proves nor disproves the existence of
Beethoven; and all that is proved by the biologist’s argument is that he was
unable to distinguish between a material and a final cause.
Here is a sentence from no less academic a source than a front-page article in
the Times Literary Supplement:—
The Frenchman, Alfred Epinas, pointed out that certain species (e.g.,
ants and wasps) can only face the horrors of life and death in
association.
I do not know what the Frenchman actually did say: what the Englishman
says he said is patently meaningless. We cannot know whether life holds
any horror for the ant, nor in what sense the isolated wasp which you kill
upon the window-pane can be said to “face” or not to “face” the horrors of
death. The subject of the article is mass-behaviour in man; and the human
motives have been unobtrusively transferred from the main proposition to
the supporting instance. Thus the argument, in effect, assumes what it sets
out to prove—a fact which would become immediately apparent if it were
presented in a formal syllogism. This is only a small and haphazard example
of a vice which pervades whole books—particularly books written by men of
science on metaphysical subjects.
Another quotation from the same issue of the T.L.S. comes in fittingly here
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to wind up this random collection of disquieting thoughts—this time from a
review of Sir Richard Livingstone’s Some Tasks for Education:—
More than once the reader is reminded of the value of an intensive
study of at least one subject, so as to learn “the meaning of knowledge”
and what precision and persistence is needed to attain it. Yet there is
else where full recognition of the distressing fact that a man may be
master in one field and show no better judgment than his neighbour
anywhere else; he remembers what he has learnt, but forgets
altogether how he learned it.
I would draw your attention particularly to that last sentence, which offers
an explanation of what the writer rightly calls the “distressing fact” that
the intellectual skills bestowed upon us by our education are not readily
transferable to subjects other than those in which we acquired them: “he
remembers what he has learnt, but forgets altogether how he learned it.”
Is it not the great defect of our education to-day (—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. It is as though we had taught a child
mechanically and by rule of thumb, to play The Harmonious Blacksmith upon
the piano, but had never taught him the scale or how to read music; so that,
having memorised The Harmonious Blacksmith, he still had not the faintest
notion how to proceed from that to tackle The Last Rose of Summer. Why do I
say, “As though”? In certain of the arts and crafts we sometimes do precisely
this—requiring a child to “express himself ” in paint before we teach him
how to handle the colours and the brush. There is a school of thought which
believes this to be the right way to set about the job. But observe—it is not
the way in which a trained craftsman will go about to teach himself a new
medium. He, having learned by experience the best way to economise labour
and take the thing by the right end, will start off by doodling about on an odd
piece of material, in order to “give himself the feel of the tool.”
Let us now look at the mediæval scheme of education—the syllabus of the
schools. It does not matter, for the moment, whether it was devised for small
children or for older students; or how long people were supposed to take over
it. What matters is the light it throws upon what the men of the Middle Ages
supposed to be the object and the right order of the educative process.
The syllabus was divided into two parts: the Trivium and Quadrivium. The
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second part—the Quadrivium—consisted of “subjects,” and need not for the
moment concern us. The interesting thing for us is the composition of the
Trivium, which preceded the Quadrivium and was the preliminary discipline
for it. It consisted of three parts: Grammar, Dialectic, and Rhetoric, in that
order.
Now the first thing we notice is that two at any rate of these “subjects” are
not what we should call “subjects” at all: they are only methods of dealing
with subjects. Grammar indeed is a “subject” in the sense that it does mean
definitely learning a language—at that period it meant learning Latin. But
language itself is simply the medium in which thought is expressed. The
whole of the Trivium was in fact intended to teach the pupil the proper use of
the tools of learning, before he began to apply them to “subjects” at all. First,
he learned a language: not just how to order a meal in a foreign language, but
the structure of language—a language–and hence of language itself—what
it was, how it was put together and how it worked. Secondly, he learned how
to use language: how to define his terms and make accurate statements; how
to construct an argument and how to detect fallacies in argument (his own
arguments and other people’s). Dialectic, that is to say, embraced Logic and
Disputation. Thirdly, he learned to express himself in language: how to say
what he had to say elegantly and persuasively. At this point, any tendency
to express himself windily or to use his eloquence so as to make the worse
appear the better reason would, no doubt, be restrained by his previous
teaching in Dialectic. If not, his teacher and his fellow-pupils, trained along
the same lines, would be quick to point out where he was wrong; for it was
they whom he had to seek to persuade. At the end of his course, he was
required to compose a thesis upon some theme set by his masters or chosen
by himself, and afterwards to defend his thesis against the criticism of
the faculty. By this time he would have learned—or woe betide him—not
merely to write an essay on paper, but to speak audibly and intelligibly
from a platform, and to use his wits quickly when heckled. The heckling,
moreover, would not consist solely of offensive personalities or of irrelevant
queries about what Julius Cæsar said in 55 B.C.—though no doubt mediæval
dialectic was enlivened in practice by plenty of such primitive repartee.
But there would also be questions, cogent and shrewd, from those who had
already run the gauntlet of debate, or were making ready to run it.
It is, of course, quite true that bits and pieces of the mediæval tradition still
linger, or have been revived, in the ordinary school syllabus of to-day. Some
knowledge of grammar is still required when learning a foreign language—
perhaps I should say, “is again required”; for during my own lifetime we
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passed through a phase when the teaching of declensions and conjugations
was considered rather reprehensible, and it was considered better to pick
these things up as we went along. School debating societies flourish; essays
are written; the necessity for “self-expression” is stressed, and perhaps even
over-stressed. But these activities are cultivated more or less in detachment,
as belonging to the special subjects in which they are pigeon-holed rather
than as forming one coherent scheme of mental training to which all
“subjects” stand in a subordinate relation. “Grammar” belongs especially to
the “subject” of foreign languages, and essay-writing to the “subject” called
“English”; while Dialectic has become almost entirely divorced from the rest
of the curriculum, and is frequently practiced unsystematically and out of
school-hours as a separate exercise, only very loosely related to the main
business of learning. Taken by and large, the great difference of emphasis
between the two conceptions holds good: modern education concentrates on
teaching subjects, leaving the method of thinking, arguing, and expressing
one’s conclusions to be picked up by the scholar as he goes along; mediæval
education concentrated on first forging and learning to handle the tools of
learning, using whatever subject came handy as a piece of material on which
to doodle until the use of the tool became second nature.
“Subjects” of some kind there must be, of course. One cannot learn the use
of a tool by merely waving it in the air; neither can one learn the theory of
grammar without learning an actual language, or learn to argue and orate
without speaking about something in particular. The debating subjects of
the Middle Ages were drawn largely from Theology, or from the Ethics and
History of Antiquity. Often, indeed, they became stereotyped, especially
towards the end of the period; and the far-fetched and wire-drawn absurdities
of scholastic argument fretted Milton and provide food for merriment even to
this day. Whether they were in themselves any more hackneyed and trivial
than the usual subjects set nowadays for “essay-writing” I should not like to
say: we may ourselves grow a little weary of “A Day in My Holidays,” “What
I should Like to Do when I Leave School,” and all the rest of it. But most
of the merriment is misplaced, because the aim and object of the debating
thesis has by now been lost sight of. A glib speaker in the Brains Trust once
entertained his audience (and reduced the late Charles Williams to helpless
rage) by asserting that in the Middle Ages it was a matter of faith to know
how many archangels could dance on the point of a needle. I need not say, I
hope, that it never was a “matter of faith”; it was simply a debating exercise,
whose set subject was the nature of angelic substance: were angels material,
and if so, did they occupy space? The answer usually adjudged correct is, I
believe, that angels are pure intelligences; not material, but limited, so that
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they may have location in space but not extension. An analogy might be
drawn from human thought, which is similarly non-material and similarly
limited. Thus, if your thought is concentrated upon one thing—say, the
point of a needle—it is located there in the sense that it is not elsewhere;
but although it is “there,” it occupies no space there, and there is nothing to
prevent an infinite number of different people’s thoughts being concentrated
upon the same needle-point at the same time. The proper subject of the
argument is thus seen to be the distinction between location and extension
in space; the matter on which the argument is exercised happens to be the
nature of angels (although, as we have seen, it might equally well have been
something else); the practical lesson to be drawn from the argument is not
to use words like “there” in a loose and unscientific way, without specifying
whether you mean “located there” or “occupying space there.” Scorn in
plenty has been poured out upon the mediæval passion for hair-splitting: but
when we look at the shameless abuse made, in print and on the platform,
of controversial expressions with shifting and ambiguous connotations, we
may feel it in our hearts to wish that every reader and hearer had been so
defensively armored by his education as to be able to cry: Distinguo.
For we let our young men and women go out unarmed, in a day when armour
was never so necessary. By teaching them all to read, we have left them at
the mercy of the printed word. By the invention of the film and the radio, we
have made certain that no aversion to reading shall secure them from the
incessant battery of words, words, words. They do not know what the words
mean; they do not know how to ward them off or blunt their edge or fling
them back; they are a prey to words in their emotions instead of being the
masters of them in their intellects. We who were scandalized in 1940 when
men were sent to fight armoured tanks with rifles, are not scandalised when
young men and women are sent into the world to fight massed propaganda
with a smattering of “subjects”; and when whole classes and whole nations
become hypnotised by the arts of the spellbinder, we have the impudence
to be astonished. We dole out lip-service to the importance of education—
lip-service and, just occasionally, a little grant of money; we postpone the
school leaving-age, and plan to build bigger and better schools; the teachers
slave conscientiously in and out of school-hours, till responsibility becomes a
burden and a nightmare; and yet, as I believe, all this devoted effort is largely
frustrated, because we have lost the tools of learning, and in their absence
can only make a botched and piecemeal job of it.
What, then, are we to do? We cannot go back to the Middle Ages. That is a
cry to which we have become accustomed. We cannot go back—or can we?
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Distinguo. I should like every term in that proposition defined. Does “Go
back” mean a retrogression in time, or the revision of an error? The first
is clearly impossible per se; the second is a thing which wise men do every
day. “Cannot”—does this mean that our behaviour is determined by some
irreversible cosmic mechanism, or merely that such an action would be very
difficult in view of the opposition it would provoke? “The Middle Ages”—
obviously the twentieth century is not and cannot be the fourteenth; but if
“the Middle Ages” is, in this context, simply a picturesque phrase denoting
a particular educational theory, there seems to be no a priori reason why we
should not “go back” to it—with modifications—as we have already “gone
back” with modifications, to, let us say, the idea of playing Shakespeare’s
plays as he wrote them, and not in the “modernised” versions of Cibber and
Garrick, which once seemed to be the latest thing in theatrical progress.
Let us amuse ourselves by imagining that such progressive retrogression
is possible. Let us make a clean sweep of all educational authorities, and
furnish ourselves with a nice little school of boys and girls whom we may
experimentally equip for the intellectual conflict along lines chosen by
ourselves. We will endow them with exceptionally docile parents; we will
staff our school with teachers who are themselves perfectly familiar with the
aims and methods of the Trivium; we will have our buildings and staff large
enough to allow our classes to be small enough for adequate handling; and we
will postulate a Board of Examiners willing and qualified to test the products
we turn out. Thus prepared, we will attempt to sketch out a syllabus—a
modern Trivium “with modifications”; and we will see where we get to.
But first: what age shall the children be? Well, if one is to educate them
on novel lines, it will be better that they should have nothing to unlearn;
besides, one cannot begin a good thing too early, and the Trivium is by its
nature not learning, but a preparation for learning. We will therefore “catch
‘em young,” requiring only of our pupils that they shall be able to read, write
and cipher.
My views about child-psychology are, I admit, neither orthodox nor
enlightened. Looking back upon myself (since I am the child I know best and
the only child I can pretend to know from inside) I recognise in myself three
states of development. These, in a rough-and-ready fashion, I will call the
Poll-parrot, the Pert, and the Poetic—the latter coinciding, approximately,
with the onset of puberty. The Poll-parrot stage is the one in which learning
by heart is easy and, on the whole, pleasurable; whereas reasoning is difficult
and, on the whole, little relished. At this age one readily memorises the
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shapes and appearances of things; one likes to recite the number-plates of
cars; one rejoices in the chanting of rhymes and the rumble and thunder of
unintelligible polysyllables; one enjoys the mere accumulation of things. The
Pert Age, which follows upon this (and, naturally, overlaps it to some extent)
is only too familiar to all who have to do with children: it is characterised by
contradicting, answering-back, liking to “catch people out” (especially one’s
elders), and the propounding of conundrums (especially the kind with a nasty
verbal catch in them). Its nuisance-value is extremely high. It usually sets in
about the Lower Fourth. The Poetic Age is popularly known as the “difficult”
age. It is self-centered; it yearns to express itself; it rather specializes in being
misunderstood; it is restless and tries to achieve independence; and, with
good luck and good guidance, it should show the beginnings of creativeness, a
reaching-out towards a synthesis of what it already knows, and a deliberate
eagerness to know and do some one thing in preference to all others. Now
it seems to me that the lay-out of the Trivium adapts itself with a singular
appropriateness to these three ages: Grammar to the Poll-parrot, Dialectic to
the Pert, and Rhetoric to the Poetic Age.
Let us begin, then, with Grammar. This, in practice, means the grammar
of some language in particular; and it must be an inflected language. The
grammatical structure of an uninflected language is far too analytical to
be tackled by any one without previous practice in Dialectic. Moreover, the
inflected languages interpret the uninflected, whereas the uninflected are
of little use in interpreting the inflected. I will say at once, quite firmly,
that the best grounding for education is the Latin grammar. I say this,
not because Latin is traditional and mediæval, but simply because even a
rudimentary knowledge of Latin cuts down the labor and pains of learning
almost any other subject by at least 50 percent. It is the key to the vocabulary
and structure of all the Romance languages and to the structure of all the
Teutonic languages, as well as to the technical vocabulary of all the sciences
and to the literature of the entire Mediterranean civilisation, together with
all its historical documents. Those whose pedantic preference for a living
language persuades them to deprive their pupils of all these advantages
might substitute Russian, whose grammar is still more primitive. (The verb
is complicated by a number of “aspects”—and I rather fancy that it enjoys
three complete voices and a couple of extra aorists—but I may be thinking
of Basque or Sanskrit.) Russian is, of course, helpful with the other Slav
dialects. There is something also to be said for classical Greek. But my own
choice is Latin. Having thus pleased the Classicists I will proceed to horrify
them by adding that I do not think it either wise or necessary to cramp
the ordinary pupil upon the Procrustean bed of the Augustan Age, with its
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highly elaborate and artificial verse-forms and oratory. The post-classical
and mediæval Latin, which was a living language down to the end of the
Renaissance, is easier and in some ways livelier, both in syntax and rhythm;
and a study of it helps to dispel the widespread notion that learning and
literature came to a full-stop when Christ was born and only woke up again
at the Dissolution of the Monasteries.
However, I am running ahead too fast. We are still in the grammatical stage.
Latin should be begun as early as possible—at a time when inflected speech
seems no more astonishing than any other phenomenon in an astonishing
world; and when the chanting of “amo, amas, amat” is as ritually agreeable to
the feelings as the chanting of “eeny, meeny, miney, mo.”
During this age we must, of course, exercise the mind on other things besides
Latin grammar. Observation and memory are the faculties most lively at this
period; and if we are to learn a contemporary foreign language we should
begin now, before the facial and mental muscles become rebellious to strange
intonations. Spoken French or German can be practised alongside the
grammatical discipline of the Latin.
In English, verse and prose can be learned by heart, and the pupil’s memory
should be stored with stories of every kind—classical myth, European legend,
and so forth. I do not think that the Classical stories and masterpieces of
ancient literature should be made the vile bodies on which to practise the
technics of Grammar—that was a fault of mediæval education which we
need not perpetuate. The stories can be enjoyed and remembered in English,
and related to their origin at a subsequent stage. Recitation aloud should
be practiced—individually or in chorus; for we must not forget that we are
laying the groundwork for Disputation and Rhetoric.
The grammar of History should consist, I think, of dates, events, anecdotes,
and personalities. A set of dates to which one can peg all later historical
knowledge is of enormous help later on in establishing the perspective of
history. It does not greatly matter which dates: those of the Kings of England
will do very nicely, provided they are accompanied by pictures of costume,
architecture, and all “every-day things,” so that the mere mention of a date
calls up a strong visual presentment of the whole period.
Geography will similarly be presented in its factual aspect, with maps,
natural features and visual presentment of customs, costumes, flora, fauna,
and so on; and I believe myself that the discredited and old-fashioned
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memorising of a few capital cities, rivers, mountain ranges, etc., does no
harm. Stamp-collecting may be encouraged.
Science, in the Poll-parrot period, arranges itself naturally and easily round
collections—the identifying and naming of specimens and, in general,
the kind of thing that used to be called “natural history,” or, still more
charmingly, “natural philosophy.” To know the names and properties of
things is, at this age, a satisfaction in itself: to recognise a devil’s coach-horse
at sight, and assure one’s foolish elders that, in spite of its appearance, it does
not sting; to be able to pick out Cassiopeia and the Pleiades, and possibly
even to know who Cassiopeia and the Pleiades were; to be aware that a whale
is not a fish, and a bat not a bird—all these things give a pleasant sensation
of superiority; while to know a ring-snake from an adder or a poisonous from
an edible toadstool is a kind of knowledge that has also a practical value.
The grammar of Mathematics begins, of course, with the multiplication
table, which, if not learnt now, will never be learnt with pleasure; and with
the recognition of geometrical shapes and the grouping of numbers. These
exercises lead naturally to the doing of simple sums in arithmetic; and if
the pupil shows a bent that way, a facility acquired at this stage is all to the
good. More complicated mathematical processes may, and perhaps should, be
postponed, for reasons which will presently appear.
So far (except, of course, for the Latin), our curriculum contains nothing that
departs very far from common practice. The difference will be felt rather
in the attitude of the teachers, who must look upon all these activities less
as “subjects” in themselves than as a gathering together of material for use
in the next part of the Trivium. What that material actually is, is only of
secondary importance; but it is as well that anything and everything which
can usefully be committed to memory should be memorised at this period,
whether it is immediately intelligible or not. The modern tendency is to
try and force rational explanations on a child’s mind at too early an age.
Intelligent questions, spontaneously asked, should, of course, receive an
immediate and rational answer; but it is a great mistake to suppose that a
child cannot readily enjoy and remember things that are beyond its power
to analyse—particularly if those things have a strong imaginative appeal
(as, for example, Kubla Khan), an attractive jingle (like some of the memory
rhymes for Latin genders), or an abundance of rich, resounding polysyllables
(like the Quicunque Vult).
This reminds me of the Grammar of Theology. I shall add it to the
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curriculum, because Theology is the Mistress-science, without which the
whole educational structure will necessarily lack its final synthesis. Those
who disagree about this will remain content to leave their pupils’ education
still full of loose ends. This will matter rather less than it might, since by
the time that the tools of learning have been forged the student will be able
to tackle Theology for himself, and will probably insist upon doing so and
making sense of it. Still, it is as well to have this matter also handy and
ready for the reason to work upon. At the grammatical age, therefore, we
should become acquainted with the story of God and Man in outline—i.e., the
Old and New Testament presented as parts of a single narrative of Creation,
Rebellion, and Redemption—and also with “the Creed, the Lord’s Prayer, and
the Ten Commandments.” At this stage, it does not matter nearly so much
that these things should be fully understood as that they should be known
and remembered. Remember, it is material that we are collecting.
It is difficult to say at what age, precisely, we should pass from the first to
the second part of the Trivium. Generally speaking, the answer is: so soon as
the pupil shows himself disposed to Pertness and interminable argument (or,
as a school-master correspondent of mine more elegantly puts it: “When the
capacity for abstract thought begins to manifest itself”). For as, in the first
part, the master-faculties are Observation and Memory, so in the second, the
master-faculty is the Discursive Reason. In the first, the exercise to which the
rest of the material was, as it were, keyed, was the Latin Grammar; in the
second the key-exercise will be Formal Logic. It is here that our curriculum
shows its first sharp divergence from modern standards. The disrepute into
which Formal Logic has fallen is entirely unjustified; and its neglect is the
root cause of nearly all those disquieting symptoms which we may note in the
modern intellectual constitution. Logic has been discredited, partly because
we have fallen into a habit of supposing that we are conditioned almost
entirely by the intuitive and the unconscious. There is no time now to argue
whether this is true; I will content myself with observing that to neglect the
proper training of the reason is the best possible way to make it true, and to
ensure the supremacy of the intuitive, irrational and unconscious elements
in our make-up. A secondary cause for the disfavour into which Formal Logic
has fallen is the belief that it is entirely based upon universal assumptions
that are either unprovable or tautological. This is not true. Not all universal
propositions are of this kind. But even if they were, it would make no
difference, since every syllogism whose major premise is in the form “All A
is B” can be recast in hypothetical form. Logic is the art of arguing correctly:
“If A, then B”; the method is not invalidated by the hypothetical character of
A. Indeed, the practical utility of Formal Logic to-day lies not so much in the
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establishment of positive conclusions as in the prompt detection and exposure
of invalid inference.
Let us now quickly review our material and see how it is to be related to
Dialectic. On the Language side, we shall now have our Vocabulary and
Morphology at our finger-tips; henceforward we can concentrate more
particularly on Syntax and Analysis (i.e., the logical construction of speech)
and the history of Language (i.e., how we come to arrange our speech as we
do in order to convey our thoughts).
Our Reading will proceed from narrative and lyric to essays, argument and
criticism, and the pupil will learn to try his own hand at writing this kind
of thing. Many lessons—on whatever subject—will take the form of debates;
and the place of individual or choral recitation will be taken by dramatic
performances, with special attention to plays in which an argument is stated
in dramatic form.
Mathematics—Algebra, Geometry, and the more advanced kind of
Arithmetic—will now enter into the syllabus and take its place as what it
really is: not a separate “subject” but a sub-department of Logic. It is neither
more nor less than the rule of the syllogism in its particular application
to number and measurement, and should be taught as such, instead of
being, for some, a dark mystery, and for others, a special revelation, neither
illuminating nor illuminated by any other part of knowledge.
History, aided by a simple system of ethics derived from the Grammar
of Theology, will provide much suitable material for discussion; was the
behaviour of this statesman justified? What was the effect of such an
enactment? What are the arguments for and against this or that form of
government? We shall thus get an introduction to constitutional History—a
subject meaningless to the young child, but of absorbing interest to those who
are prepared to argue and debate. Theology itself will furnish material for
argument about conduct and morals; and should have its scope extended by a
simplified course of dogmatic theology (i.e., the rational structure of Christian
thought), clarifying the relations between the dogma and the ethics, and
lending itself to that application of ethical principles in particular instances
which is properly called casuistry. Geography and the Sciences will all
likewise provide material for Dialectic.
But above all, we must not neglect the material which is so abundant in
the pupils’ own daily life. There is a delightful passage in Leslie Paul’s The
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Living Hedge which tells how a number of small boys enjoyed themselves for
days arguing about an extraordinary shower of rain which had fallen in their
town—a shower so localised that it left one half of the main street wet and
the other dry. Could one, they argued, properly say that it had rained that
day on or over the town or only in the town? How many drops of water were
required to constitute rain? and so on. Argument about this led on to a host
of similar problems about rest and motion, sleep and waking, est and non est,
and the infinitesimal division of time. The whole passage is an admirable
example of the spontaneous development of the ratiocinative faculty and the
natural and proper thirst of the awakening reason for definition of terms and
exactness of statement. All events are food for such an appetite. An umpire’s
decision; the degree to which one may transgress the spirit of a regulation
without being trapped by the letter; on such questions as these, children are
born casuists, and their natural propensity only needs to be developed and
trained—and, especially, brought into an intelligible relationship with events
in the grown-up world. The newspapers are full of good material for such
exercises: legal decisions, on the one hand, in cases where the cause at issue
is not too abstruse; on the other, fallacious reasoning and muddle-headed
argument, with which the correspondence columns of certain papers one
could name are abundantly stocked.
Wherever the matter for Dialectic is found, it is, of course, highly important
that attention should be focused upon the beauty and economy of a fine
demonstration or a well-turned argument, lest veneration should wholly
die. Criticism must not be merely destructive; though at the same time
both teacher and pupils must be ready to detect fallacy, slipshod reasoning,
ambiguity, irrelevance, and redundancy, and to pounce upon them like rats.
This is the moment when précis-writing may be usefully undertaken;
together with such exercises as the writing of an essay, and the reduction of
it, when written, by 25 or 50 percent.
It will doubtless be objected that to encourage young persons at the Pert Age
to browbeat, correct, and argue with their elders will render them perfectly
intolerable. My answer is that children of that age are intolerable anyhow;
and that their natural argumentativeness may just as well be canalised to
good purpose as allowed to run away into the sands. It may, indeed, be rather
less obtrusive at home if it is disciplined in school; and, anyhow, elders who
have abandoned the wholesome principle that children should be seen and
not heard have no one to blame but themselves. The teachers, to be sure, will
have to mind their step, or they may get more than they bargained for. All
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children sit in judgment on their masters; and if the Chaplain’s sermon or the
Headmistress’s annual Speech-day address should by any chance afford an
opening for the point of the critical wedge, that wedge will go home the more
forcibly under the weight of the Dialectical hammer, wielded by a practised
hand. That is why I said that the teachers themselves would have to have
undergone the discipline of the Trivium before they set out to impose it on
their charges.
Once again: the contents of the syllabus at this stage may be anything you
like. The “subjects” supply material; but they are all to be regarded as mere
grist for the mental mill to work upon. The pupils should be encouraged to go
and forage for their own information, and so guided towards the proper use
of libraries and books of reference, and shown how to tell which sources are
authoritative and which are not.
Towards the close of this stage, the pupils will probably be beginning to
discover for themselves that their knowledge and experience are insufficient,
and that their trained intelligences need a great deal more material to
chew upon. The imagination—usually dormant during the Pert Age—will
reawaken, and prompt them to suspect the limitations of logic and reason.
This means that they are passing into the Poetic Age and are ready to
embark on the study of Rhetoric. The doors of the storehouse of knowledge
should now be thrown open for them to browse about as they will. The things
once learned by rote will now be seen in new contexts; the things once coldly
analyzed can now be brought together to form a new synthesis; here and
there a sudden insight will bring about that most exciting of all discoveries:
the realisation that a truism is true.
It is difficult to map out any general syllabus for the study of Rhetoric: a
certain freedom is demanded. In literature, appreciation should be again
allowed to take the lead over destructive criticism; and self-expression in
writing can go forward, with its tools now sharpened to cut clean and observe
proportion. Any child that already shows a disposition to specialise should
be given his head: for, when the use of the tools has been well and truly
learned it is available for any study whatever. It would be well, I think,
that each pupil should learn to do one, or two, subjects really well, while
taking a few classes in subsidiary subjects so as to keep his mind open to
the inter-relations of all knowledge. Indeed, at this stage, our difficulty will
be to keep “subjects” apart; for as Dialectic will have shown all branches of
learning to be inter-related, so Rhetoric will tend to show that all knowledge
is one. To show this, and show why it is so, is pre-eminently the task of the
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Mistress-science. But whether Theology is studied or not, we should at least
insist that children who seem inclined to specialise on the mathematical and
scientific side should be obliged to attend some lessons in the Humanities
and vice versâ. At this stage also, the Latin Grammar, having done its work,
may be dropped for those who prefer to carry on their language studies on
the modern side; while those who are likely never to have any great use or
aptitude for mathematics might also be allowed to rest, more or less, upon
their oars. Generally speaking: whatsoever is mere apparatus may now be
allowed to fall into the background, while the trained mind is gradually
prepared for specialisation in the “subjects” which, when the Trivium is
completed, it should be perfectly well equipped to tackle on its own. The final
synthesis of the Trivium—the presentation and public defence of the thesis—
should be restored in some form; perhaps as a kind of “leaving examination”
during the last term at school.
The scope of Rhetoric depends also on whether the pupil is to be turned out
into the world at the age of sixteen or whether he is to proceed to public
school and/or university. Since, really, Rhetoric should be taken at about
fourteen, the first category of pupil should study Grammar from about nine
to eleven, and Dialectic from twelve to fourteen; his last two school years
would then be devoted to Rhetoric, which, in his case, would be of a fairly
specialized and vocational kind, suiting him to enter immediately upon some
practical career. A pupil of the second category would finish his Dialectical
course in his Preparatory School, and take Rhetoric during his first two
years at his Public School. At sixteen, he would be ready to start upon those
“subjects” which are proposed for his later study at the university; and this
part of his education will correspond to the mediæval Quadrivium. What
this amounts to is that the ordinary pupil, whose formal education ends at
sixteen, will take the Trivium only; whereas scholars will take both Trivium
and Quadrivium.
Is the Trivium, then, a sufficient education for life? Properly taught, I believe
that it should be. At the end of the Dialectic, the children will probably seem
to be far behind their coevals brought up on old-fashioned “modern” methods,
so far as detailed knowledge of specific subjects is concerned. But after the
age of fourteen they should be able to overhaul the others hand over fist.
Indeed, I am not at all sure that a pupil thoroughly proficient in the Trivium
would not be fit to proceed immediately to the university at the age of sixteen,
thus proving himself the equal of his mediæval counterpart, whose precocity
often appears to us so astonishing and unaccountable. This, to be sure, would
make hay of the public-school system, and disconcert the universities very
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much—it would, for example, make quite a different thing of the Oxford and
Cambridge Boat-race. But I am not now considering the feelings of academic
bodies: I am concerned only with the proper training of the mind to encounter
and deal with the formidable mass of undigested problems presented to it by
the modern world. For the tools of learning are the same, in any and every
subject; and the person who knows how to use them will, at any age, get the
mastery of a new subject in half the time and with a quarter of the effort
expended by the person who has not the tools at his command. To learn six
subjects without remembering how they were learnt does nothing to ease the
approach to a seventh; to have learnt and remembered the art of learning
makes the approach to every subject an open door.
It is clear that the successful teaching of this neo-mediæval curriculum
will depend even more than usual upon the working together of the whole
teaching staff towards a common purpose. Since no subject is considered
as an end in itself, any kind of rivalry in the staff-room will be sadly out
of place. The fact that a pupil is unfortunately obliged, for some reason, to
miss the History period on Fridays, or the Shakespeare class on Tuesdays,
or even to omit a whole subject in favour of some other subject, must not be
allowed to cause any heart-burnings—the essential is that he should acquire
the method of learning in whatever medium suits him best. If human nature
suffers under this blow to one’s professional pride in one’s own subject, there
is comfort in the thought that the end-of-term examination results will not
be affected; for the papers will be so arranged as to be an examination in
method, by whatever means.
I will add that it is highly important that every teacher should, for his or
her own sake, be qualified and required to teach in all three parts of the
Trivium; otherwise the Masters of Dialectic, especially, might find their
minds hardening into a permanent adolescence. For this reason, teachers in
Preparatory Schools should also take Rhetoric classes in the Public Schools to
which they are attached; or if they are not so attached, then by arrangement
in other schools in the same neighbourhood. Alternatively, a few preliminary
classes in Rhetoric might be taken in Preparatory Schools from the age of
thirteen onwards.
Before concluding these necessarily very sketchy suggestions, I ought to say
why I think it necessary, in these days, to go back to a discipline which we
had discarded. The truth is that for the last 300 years or so we have been
living upon our educational capital. The post-Renaissance world, bewildered
and excited by the profusion of new “subjects” offered to it, broke away from
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the old discipline (which had, indeed, become sadly dull and stereotyped
in its practical application) and imagined that henceforward it could, as it
were, disport itself happily in its new and extended Quadrivium without
passing through the Trivium. But the scholastic tradition, though broken and
maimed, still lingered in the public schools and universities: Milton, however
much he protested against it, was formed by it—the debate of the Fallen
Angels, and the disputation of Abdiel with Satan have the tool-marks of the
Schools upon them, and might, incidentally, profitably figure as a set passage
for our Dialectical studies. Right down to the nineteenth century, our public
affairs were mostly managed, and our books and journals were for the most
part written, by people brought up in homes, and trained in places, where
that tradition was still alive in the memory and almost in the blood. Just
so, many people to-day who are atheist or agnostic in religion, are governed
in their conduct by a code of Christian ethics which is so rooted in their
unconscious assumptions that it never occurs to them to question it.
But one cannot live on capital forever. A tradition, however firmly rooted, if
it is never watered, though it dies hard, yet in the end it dies. And to-day a
great number—perhaps the majority—of the men and women who handle
our affairs, write our books and our newspapers, carry out research, present
our plays and our films, speak from our platforms and pulpits—yes, and
who educate our young people, have never, even in a lingering traditional
memory, undergone the scholastic discipline. Less and less do the children
who come to be educated bring any of that tradition with them. We have lost
the tools of learning—the axe and the wedge, the hammer and the saw, the
chisel and the plane—that were so adaptable to all tasks. Instead of them, we
have merely a set of complicated jigs, each of which will do but one task and
no more, and in using which eye and hand receive no training, so that no man
ever sees the work as a whole or “looks to the end of the work.” What use is
it to pile task on task and prolong the days of labour, if at the close the chief
object is left unattained? It is not the fault of the teachers—they work only
too hard already. The combined folly of a civilisation that has forgotten its
own roots is forcing them to shore up the tottering weight of an educational
structure that is built upon sand. They are doing for their pupils the work
which the pupils themselves ought to do. For the sole true end of education
is simply this: to teach men how to learn for themselves; and whatever
instruction fails to do this is effort spent in vain.
DOROTHY L. SAYERS
Witham, Essex
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