The Lost Tools of Learning

by Dorothy L. Sayers

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.

For we let our young men and women go out unarmed, in a day when armor was never so necessary.

the Trivium is by its nature not learning, but a preparation for learning.

Poll-Parrot, the Pert, and the Poetic—the

Grammar to the Poll-Parrot,

Parrot, Dialectic to the Pert, and Rhetoric to the Poetic age.

I will say at once, quite firmly, that the best grounding for education is the Latin grammar. I say this, not because Latin is traditional and mediaeval, but simply because even a rudimentary knowledge of Latin cuts down the labor and pains of learning almost any other subject by at least fifty percent.

For the sole true end of education is simply this: to teach men how to learn for themselves; and whatever instruction fails to do this is effort spent in vain.