This is not the first time I have read Sayer’s essay on education, but it is the first time I have read it carefully in a while.

Contemporary students are, at best, like a computer that has a broadband connection to the Internet but without any sort of firewall or anti-virus and anti-spyware protection.

Or, to use a related comparison, contemporary students are, at best, like a computer with a huge hard drive filled with many files, but with an inadequate CPU and ram, or else are lacking in programs to actually find and use the data for constructive purposes.

Dorothy Sayers did not use these metaphors, but they demonstrate her concerns. Is the purpose of universal literacy to increase the number of independent critical thinkers or cooperative consumers? Is literacy a good thing to permit free thinking or is it to provide an audience for soap commercials?

If anything, our situation is worse than it was in Sayers’ day because it is not uncommon to see young people asked to tell TV audiences what they “think” about important subjects, which usually consists in an unorganized series of words describing feelings.

Furthermore, while Sayers rues the rush to “subjects” before covering how to think, in America it seems that “training” for life and career has become an obsession that is equated with education when it is actually not the same thing. As Albert Jay Nock—himself an advocate of classical education—wrote in the first half of the twentieth century in his essay, “The Disadvantages of Being Educated,”

Forty years ago a man trained to proficiency in anything was respected accordingly, but was not regarded as an educated man, or “just as good,” on the strength of it. A trained mechanic, banker, dentist or man of business got all due credit for his proficiency, but his education, if he had any, lay behind that and was not confused with it. His training, in a word, bore directly upon what he could do or get, while his education bore directly on neither; it bore upon what he could become and be.

So while learning is always a part of any school curriculum, the focus—before subjects or training—should be on learning how to learn and giving the student the ability to learn not only in the classroom but on his own for the rest of his life.I appreciated Sayers’ tripartite scheme for the average developing child. I can see how the Grammar stage would make sense for the young and the Dialectic stage for the slightly older while the Rhetoric stage would start during adolescence (a glance at YouTube will provide loads of confirming evidence for this last claim, as well as for the need for better education in rhetoric). However, I hope that it isn’t entirely dependent on catching the child at an early age. I imagine that classical schools will ordinarily have a number of students joining them at later grades who have not had the previous benefit of a classical education.

The challenge to some extent of this “new old” approach is to focus on the child’s character and mind rather than on an amount of testable knowledge. This would not be a difficulty in the first stage (if one would be content with facts and not try to instill too many explanations), but I notice Sayers predicting that, “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.” This is exactly the sort of perception that can make people get frustrated with what would be, in the end, a superior educational procedure. The classically educated students will be progressing in ways that are not as obvious or glorious. The Trivium obviously requires patience and faith.

I really appreciated Sayers’ confidence that childhood “obnoxiousness” (my term) actually reveals the real potential strength of mind and character that they should grow to posses.

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 canalized to good purpose as allowed to run away into the sands.

Likewise, I appreciated her advice that a child “should be given his head” once he is a teen, if he shows a desire to specialize in a certain subject.

The bottom line is that Sayers’ perspective appeals to me because she makes it clear that the best education is the one that teaches students how to educate themselves, not during school, but for the rest of their lives.