Yard Sale of the Mind

This short talk, given by Dorothy L. Sayers at Oxford in 1947, can be found online here among other places. It’s only a few pages long – 14 pages in 12-point Ariel – so I encourage everyone to read it. Sayers echoes many of the thoughts you may have read here (or rather, I echoed her without knowing it – we both were looking at many of the same sources, I suspect), except in much more elegant, amusing, and erudite English.

Before getting started, I propose we think of education as having 3 parts: content, methods, and goals. In almost every discussion of education I’ve read or been involved with, people focus almost entirely on content, with a little attention given to method and even less to goals. Common Core, to pick an egregious example, is content. The method remains the same as it ever was: lessons delivered by a professional ‘educator’ over short class periods, to students segregated by age. The goals – and I’m not talking about test scores or ‘grade level’ as those are part of the method – are so nebulous as to defy objection. Don’t take my word for it, here they are:

The goal is to ensure that all students graduate high school prepared for college, careers, and life—no matter where they live.

The Common Core website

Who but a curmudgeon like me could object to that? Let’s not get all pedantic over if it is a good thing for “all students” to be prepared for college, what careers they should be prepared for, or what sort of life they ought to lead. Let’s just accept that the sort of people who write things like this (and worse) get to decide. Since these professionally trained and certified experts in education get to decide the goals, and the content and method flow from those goals, what’s left to argue about? It’s easy to get distracted by content, which is the part we see and the part where the masks are fully off, and start protesting against sexual perversion and race hatred, as if those bits of content don’t flow from the goals. The experts have determined that these subjects are part of how we get to their goals. What part of ‘expert’ don’t you understand?

It’s somewhat less common for parents to see that the methods, which also flow from the experts’ goals, are at least as damaging as the content. Occasionally, someone might notice that virtually all homework is pointless busywork, or that their child doesn’t like being grouped and shuffled about with kids his age, despite sharing few interests and having no personal relationships with most of them. We accept that the age-segregated classrooms, fixed short class periods, mountains of homework, and complete takeover of our kids’ (and our) lives simply ARE schooling. We ignore that such schooling is a colossal waste of our kids’ lives and a profound insult to their humanity.

Sayers begins by correctly identifying the chief function of modern school as child care:

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.

She then proceeds to hold up goals and methods for our consideration:

I propose only to deal with the subject of teaching, properly so-called. I want to inquire whether, amid ail 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.

So now we must consider what ‘better results’ we want, and what to teach, and how to teach it, to get those results.

Sayers notes something obvious to anyone who looks seriously at the history of education before all the education reform movements of the turn of the 19th century resulted in the system we use now: kids studied much more difficult things at a much earlier age in the past than they do today.

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.

This is a very good start – simply noting that, prior to modern schooling, many 14 year olds went to university, and, after a few years, were considered responsible adults ready to manage their own lives and take on serious, responsible jobs. Sayers also recognizes something familiar to long-time readers of this blog: artificially extending ‘intellectual childhood’ is damaging to both students and society. One of the fundamental assumptions behind the rigid, long, and carefully controlled schooling we inflict on children today is that kids wouldn’t learn anything otherwise – we must force them to learn! Yet, before this model was universally accepted, somehow kids learned enough to get into college without its ‘benefits.’ Sayer has more to say on that later.

Next, she addresses what might be called the widespread lack of critical thinking among even the best educated of moderns, as measured by the current system (i.e., those who have collected the most and best diplomas and degrees):

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?…

Have you ever, in listening to a debate among adult and presumably 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?…

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?

Sayers sees things, and notices things. She was largely homeschooled by her very well educated parents, beginning to learn Latin before the age of 7, and German and French from governesses. She didn’t start formal schooling until she was 15, stuck it out for 3 years, and then got a scholarship to Oxford. She knew from experience that a child does not need rigid structure and micromanagement at the hands of experts to learn.

Sayers then gives examples of stupid things well-educated people write and say, displaying their lack of understanding of basic logic and coherence.

She concludes with a quotation from the Times Literary Supplement, which ends with this observation about the well-schooled: “(H)e remembers what he has learnt, but forgets altogether how he learned it.”

Is 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.

We now arrive at the source of the title of this paper: Sayers contends that the tools of learning, that set of skills and habits that enable a person to profitably approach a new, unmastered subject and master it, are not unknown, but have been lost. To find these lost tools, she looks to the Middle Ages, but also at craftsmen.¹

To put Sayer’s thesis into the terms with which I began this review: the syllabus of medieval studies illuminates the goals, which in turn form its methods and content. Of the two classic divisions of study, the Trivium and Quadrivium, Sayers finds the tools of learning in the former. The Quadrivium consists of subjects to be mastered; the Trivium comprises the tools by which any subject might be mastered. What might be called its subjects – grammar, logic/dialectic, and rhetoric – are fundamental to the fruitful understanding of any subject.

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.

(Notice who above is doing the ‘teaching’ in rhetoric – his teacher AND his fellow students. Very real world. )

Sayers sums up:

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; mediaeval 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.

When to start such an education? How does one proceed? This depends on the growth of the child. Sayers uses her own childhood as her source of data, observing three stages of growth and proposing the appropriate things to study during each:

I recognise in myself three stages 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 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 in 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. (around 11 years old – ed.) The Poetic Age is popularly known as the “difficult” age. It is self-centred; it yearns to express itself; it rather specialises 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.

I note here the ‘rough and ready’ nature of Sayers’ stages. A student would begin each of these stages when ready, not merely of the right age, and, presumably, be done with them once they have sufficiently mastered the ‘tools’ and are thus ready for the next stage/tool. My emphasis, not Sayers, but this conclusion flows both from Sayers’s argument and from medieval practice.

Introducing students to the steps of the Trivium according to where the student is in his own intellectual development is not just a good practical idea, it is the recognition of the child’s fundamental humanity. Children are ready when they are ready. Adults who presume that they have the right and authority to attempt to force a child to ‘perform to grade level’ (an entirely arbitrary concept) are bullies, however well-intentioned. Children who fail for whatever reason to ‘perform’ are then treated as failures and problems to be solved. Anyone who has spent any time around schooling has seen this.

Back to Sayers. She next outlines how the Poll-Parrot, the Pert, and the Poetic map to the Trivium, and suggests a syllabus of sorts to be worked through at each stage. The Poll-Parrot education focuses on mastering Latin grammar, with other exercises in memory related to History, Science, and Geography. In Math, multiplication tables are memorized, in keeping with the theme of exercising memory. Modern foreign languages could also be profitably studied at this stage. Stories and poetry make up an important part of Poll-Parrot education.

Sayers adds Theology to the Poll-Parrot stage:

I shall add it to the 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.

The Pert learns the basics of Logic and Dialectic:

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 schoolmaster 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.

In the great medieval universities, mastery of Latin was a prerequisite to admission (mastered in ‘grammar school’) and so the first things the new roughly 14 year old student would study would be Aristotle’s Organon. (Organon means instrument or tool.) The Organon consists of six works: Categories, On Interpretation, Prior Analytics, Posterior Analytics, Topics, and On Sophistical Refutations. These works move logically from most basic to advanced, from how to understand and define terms through how to spot logical fallacies.

When Sayers was being educated, British schoolboys were still expected to memorize all the logical formulas from Posterior Analytics. I don’t know how much farther the English took it. I imagine it would have been unimaginable to the 19th century Oxford dons for a college student not to know something so basic. The Organon, and the mastery of Latin needed to master it, could be said to be the Lost Tools of Learning of which Sayers writes.

The Pert stage is centered on discursive reasoning, no matter what ‘subject’ matter is used. Beauty should be recognized and encouraged.

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.

Sayers emphasizes several times that the three stages blend into each other and are not hard and fast divisions into which children should be classified. Perhaps a good teacher will need to understand the child to the point of taking what the child says about his desires and feelings seriously in order to guide that child most profitably and with the least violence. I only note that when children say they don’t want to go to school – a daily occurrence – they are routinely and summarily dismissed. That’s where the whole compulsory aspect of modern schooling comes into play. Parents are threatened by the law with no appeal, and they then turn this threat onto their children. Over time, we develop the habit of excusing in advance this behavior in ourselves and in our government. We parents are desensitized and numbed, which he pass on to our children. Most kids learn in first grade that it doesn’t do any good to complain to the adults – teachers and parents – that they don’t want to go to school. Then it becomes a target of mockery – only losers, back row kids, complain. WE know it’s for our own good! WE know that success in school maps directly to success in life. So only a sniveling baby would complain about being made to go to school.

Need to wrap this up. Please go read this essay in its entirety. In conclusion, two quotations from the beginning of the essay. First, the cost of schooling children to be impervious to true learning:

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.

Second, Sayers is close to despairing of any real changes to education. We cannot afford to despair, or we will lose our freedom entirely with little hope of ever getting it back.

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.

1. I contend that these two things – craftsmen and schoolmen – are hardly different in how they go about their task of learning. In the Middle Ages, they were all considered guilds containing masters of their crafts. ↩︎