10.14.2011

The Lost Tools of Learning


Dorothy Leigh Sayers’s essay “The Lost Tools of Learning” (1947) argues that the medieval scheme of education can be revived and applied in a modern context to achieve what she sees as education’s true end: to teach people to learn for themselves. She develops her argument by sketching a syllabus of grammar, logic, and rhetoric and giving examples of how these three subjects constitute the tools used for the study of all subjects.  Sayer’s purpose is to raise the level of intellectual discourse and reduce compartmentalization in order to help people to become less susceptible to mass persuasion and more intellectually free. Sayers emphasizes that she is not an expert in education, but establishes herself as an intellectual, uncomfortable with the current state of education and discourse, who is reaching out to other intellectuals with an idea for improving it.

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