I know who Dorothy Sayers is now!

While reading "The Well Trained Mind"  I stumbled upon a review and a link to this essay by Dorothy Sayers.  In it she discusses the 'lost tools of learning' and how education should 'go back to the middle ages' and use the Trivium model to help regain the tools of learning.  Trivium apparently a method involving the 'grammar, dialectic, and rhetoric' stages.

I used a quote of hers when I discussed learning Latin months ago.  "Latin should be begun as early as possible--at a time when inflected speech seems no more astonishing than any other phenomenon in an astonishing world; and when the chanting of "Amo, amas, amat" is as ritually agreeable to the feelings as the chanting of "eeny, meeny, miney, moe.""


While I loved the quote and felt it truly explained why I want to work on Latin so young, I was too lazy to look up who she was.  I am still too lazy to do more than read the blurb at the bottom of the essay.


In reading the essay (a good deal shorter, and much easier to stay awake for than TWTM)  I noticed something odd.  She suggests that we start educating children very young stating "one cannot begin a good thing too early, and the Trivium is by its nature not learning, but a preparation for learning. We will, therefore, "catch 'em young," requiring of our pupils only that they shall be able to read, write, and cipher."


I wasn't sure what to think on reading that line.  On the one hand she says catch them young, on the other she says they aught to know how to read and write before they enter school.  (something that used to be much more common)


Then at almost the end she tells the reader what age she feels match up with each stage. "first category of pupil should study Grammar from about 9 to 11, and Dialectic from 12 to 14; his last two school years would then be devoted to Rhetoric"


Nine!  She felt that a child of nine was "catching em young".  And that after only 6 years a pupil would be ready to enter a vocation or university.


We certainly have things a bit different today.  We start children learning so much earlier, and we 'graduate' them so much later with no intention that they enter into a career straight from this 'schooling'.


I absolutely loved her descriptions of each learning phase, she suggests taking a child in the natural 'argumentative' phase and using that natural goal to help them learn proper 'debate' or logic.  Then of course when they get to the self centered expressive phase, we should be able to hand them the paper and watch the creativity flow.  Since the goal is to teach the 'tools' a kid of 14 or 15 should simply be refining the essay skills while getting all that self expression out.


I found it really easy to relate to her ideas.  She suggests we work on giving children the basics, then teaching them some deductive reasoning, then letting them pursue for the most part whatever interests them most.  Sounds like my whole theory on education!


Only my basics look a bit different from hers, the 4 R's are not quite the same.  Plus I have no formal theory for the 'older grades' (only experience I have with them is my own).  And of course I have a different definition of 'catch em young'!


I just might get a logic course and test out her theory, though apparently I have to wait a year or two!