Category: Classical Education

Dorothy Sayers

In 1945, Dorothy Sayers’ gave a talk during a summer education conference at Oxford, which was later printed. Early on in my teaching journey, I had encountered her speech and understood it to be a discussion on a method of teaching. However, I recently took it up again, thirteen years later, and had a completely different understanding of her purpose.

In the opening pages of her paper, Sayers expresses concern that modern education has prolonged the years of education but has not produced more learned individuals.  Her intent was to investigate 

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 (2). 

Sayers’ concern was a real one, and her audience understood it.  As previously mentioned, she was addressing teachers during a summer break course in education at Oxford, and she began with a proposition targeted towards them: “[teachers] all work much too hard and have far too many things to do” (2).  She knew her audience and read the room!  Her questions to them were relatable:

“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?”

As she notes towards the end of her paper,

“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” (19). 

According to Sayers, more subjects is not the answer, because “[t]o learn six subjects without remembering how they were learnt does nothing to ease the approach to a seventh”.  Instead, she says, “to have learnt and remembered the art of learning makes the approach to every subject an open door” (19).  Sayers was not trying to redefine classical education.  She insists in her paper “teachers themselves would have to have undergone the discipline of the Trivium before they set out to impose it on their charges” (17), and she meant it in all the fullness of the classical Trivium.  She was simply taking the educators present at her conference through a thought experiment:  

“Let us make a clean sweep of all educational authorities, and furnish ourselves with a nice little school of boys and girls who 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 schools 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” (10).

Sayers’ paper was written to educators, who were educated in the Trivium.  Her intent was to consider why, even though the years of school attendance were longer, students did not retain knowledge of subjects.  She suggested a technique for teaching the Trivium in the modern school to teachers: teach the Trivium subjects in a manner that would still allow students to complete school by the time they were sixteen.  At that time, students would be suited to enter “upon some practical career” or “start upon those subjects which are proposed for [their] later study at the university; and this part of [their] education will correspond to the mediaeval Quadrivium” (18).

So, my first objective was to get at Sayers’ aim for myself.  It seems to me her intent was not to lay down a new taxonomy as much as it was to help out modern era educators in attendance at the Oxford summer course, who were being inundated with subjects in their curriculum.  The results they were seeing from graduates of their modern schools were not encouraging: students who could not remember what they learned or how to learn.  The school was adding more subjects and years of schooling with poor results.  Sayers brushed aside all the extra subjects and took her audience back to brass tacks: the trivium. She never explicitly stated that the content was the trivium, because it was understood. The teachers already possessed the content, because they were classically educated.  She was giving the teachers a way to teach students the trivium in the modern classroom; get those students to memorize, teach them to argue, and teach them how to express themselves.  Memorize what? Argue about what? Express themselves about what?  The ‘what’ was given; they were at an education conference at Oxford.  It’s not any different than when we attend a classical education conference held by a publisher today.  The teacher’s conference is there to support the teacher and help them.  Do your students need more practice? Here are some flash cards.  You’ve never made a lesson plan? Here’s one that you may find helpful.  But no one asks “what should I teach?”, because it is known: we are teaching the curriculum produced by the publisher hosting the conference. With Sayers, it was the same. They were at Oxford; the content was known to everyone present: the Trivium.