Whew, it has been a busy June. Here is an essay by Dorothy Sayers on education, The Lost Tools of Learning. She wrote this essay in 1947, but it still seems very timely.
Sayers bases her essay on the Trivium and the Quadrivium, the liberal learning of the Middle Ages. Respectively the subjects were Grammar, Dialectic, Rhetoric, and Arithmetic, Geometry, Astronomy, Music. The education of the Middle Ages focused heavily on logic, mathematics, and natural science. Perhaps in no other time has education been so heavily scientific.
I enjoyed this essay, and I ponder it often, thinking about the best manner of educating.
A good article on grossly overlooked processes and objects of learning. Everytime I hear an ‘expert’ say we need to train harder in math and sciences, I also want them to add liberal arts to the mix. (Logic being probably the most useful class I have ever taken.) I often cringe when these arts, music underlined, are left out of a proper education.