"The Lost Tools of Learning" and "How We Lost Lutheran Education"

The remarkable Oxford scholar (and Christian apologist) Dorothy Sayers (1893-1957) wrote an uncannily prescient essay back in 1947 called: "The Lost Tools of Learning."

Here is a quote:

For 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. We dole out lip-service to the importance of education--lip- service and, just occasionally, a little grant of money; we postpone the school-leaving age, and plan to build bigger and better schools; the teachers slave conscientiously in and out of school hours; and yet, as I believe, all this devoted effort is largely frustrated, because we have lost the tools of learning, and in their absence can only make a botched and piecemeal job of it.

That which Sayers complained of has gotten exponentially worse, thanks to the age of television, the vast expansion of marketing and political propaganda, the rejection of tradition in society and the academy, and the experimental educational "progressivism" following the 1960s.

Interestingly, Dr. Sayers' conclusions are reflected by Lutheran scholar Dr. Gene Edward Veith more than 60 years later in his article "How We Lost Lutheran Education in the Missouri Synod."

Both Sayers and Veith point to the traditional classical educational model as the corrective. These are two very interesting articles to read in juxtaposition with one another. Though written six decades apart in opposite hemispheres and from two different Christian traditions, their diagnoses and proposed solution are basically the same.