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Classical Educational Services

Over the past decade numerous articles and books have been written on the resurgance of an approach to education commonly known as “classical”. One of the early books, Douglas Wilson’s Recovering the Lost Tools of Learning, reintroduced the reading population to a short essay by Dorothy L. Sayers entitled The Lost Tools of Learning. Both texts are well worth reading. But listen to a couple of specific points Sayers makes. She writes,

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.

Does this sound familiar?

 

After giving a consise description of the Trivium and stating that Theology should be added to the curriculum “because theology is mistress-science without which the whole educational structure will necessairly lack its final synthesis” she writes a paragraph which still proves to be true. She writes,

Is the Trivium, then, a sufficient education for life? Properly taught, I believe that it should be. At the end of the Dialectic, the children will probably seem to be far behind their coevals brought up on old-fashioned "modern" methods, so far as detailed knowledge of specific subjects is concerned. But after the age of 14 they should be able to overhaul the others hand over fist. Indeed, I am not at all sure that a pupil thoroughly proficient in the Trivium would not be fit to proceed immediately to the university at the age of 16, thus proving himself the equal of his mediaeval counterpart, whose precocity astonished us at the beginning of this discussion. This, to be sure, would make hay of the English public-school system, and disconcert the universities very much. It would, for example, make quite a different thing of the Oxford and Cambridge boat race.

Her concern is “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.”  We concur and add that responsible stewardship of our children is to fully equip, prepare and inspire them for purposeful and challenging lives of service to the glory of God. This is the mission of Classical Educational Services and The Classical School.