If you’re involved in classical Christian education, you’ve probably read Dorothy Sayers’ essay, “The Lost Tools of Learning.” Based on a lecture she delivered at Oxford University in 1947, it is Sayers’ lament over England’s dismal system of education. It is also her proposal to save education by returning to a classical/medieval paradigm of education based on the Trivium.
What you might not know is that Sayers was not the only Christian literary figure who wrote about education in the 1940s. In The Year of Our Lord 1943: Christian Humanism in an Age of Crisis, Alan Jacobs describes how the Second World War prompted a brief but extraordinary outpouring of writings on Christian education by authors like T. S. Eliot, W. H. Auden, Jacques Maritain, Simone Weil, and C. S. Lewis. (You may be familiar with The Abolition of Man, which Lewis wrote in 1943.)
It may seem odd, however, that the largest war in human history would prompt so many authors to write about education, of all things. Weren’t there more pressing matters at hand, like defeating the Nazis? The answer is that these writers (“Christian humanists,” as Jacobs identifies them) understood the war to be a symptom of much deeper problems. Most important among these problems was a distorted view of human nature driven by secularism, nationalism, technocracy, and other modernistic ideologies in vogue at the time.
Once the war was over, these thinkers proposed, the West must rebuild itself. But upon what foundation? And to where should we look for hope for the future? Politics? Technology? Science? Or should we look back to the past, seeking out a vision of reality and of human nature rooted in our rich theological traditions and building upon the best of what has been handed down from Western culture? In sum: what worldview are we bequeathing to our children, and what kind of world are we creating by doing so?
These are the major questions that concerned Lewis, Eliot, Weil, and the other authors depicted in this book. These are also questions that concerned Dorothy Sayers in “The Lost Tools of Learning.” Sayers does not figure prominently in this book, but the story Jacobs tells provides rich context for Sayers’ essay. Personally, I don’t think it’s an accident that Sayers’ ideas about education, written when the world had been devastated a world war, were seized upon by parents and educators in the 1980s and 1990s, when they realized the hearts and minds of their children were under siege in the midst of a culture war.
And what is a Christian to do in a time of war? The answer is simple: build better schools!