The Lost Tools of Learning

By Dorothy L. Sayers
Foreword by Dan Russ
(2004)

Discussion Guide Included

“The person who is denied or declines the opportunity to be a student of life is destined to a diminished existence,” says Dan Russ in the Foreword to this interesting Reading. 

Dorothy L. Sayers (1893–1957) was an English scholar, essayist, translator, mystery writer, and Christian apologist. This lecture turned essay was first presented in Oxford in 1947 and is a brilliant treatise on the foundational elements of a classical Christian education. More important, it helps raise questions—and offers answers—about the role of education in a democratic society. In attempting to recover the classical liberal arts model of education for our times, says Dr. Russ, “she reminds us that learning is essential to human nature, to the joy of living, and essential to human culture, to the vision of a good life for all.”

“We let our young men and women go out unarmed, in a day when armor 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 armored tanks with rifles, are not scandalized 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 hypnotized by the arts of the spell binder, we have the impudence to be astonished.”Dorothy L. Sayers

Category: Readings (No. 36)