I find myself in a complicated relationship with Dorothy L. Sayers. In The Mind of the Maker, Sayers articulates a view of poiesis on par with Tolkien’s “On Faerie-Stories” and Eliot’s Notes Towards a Christian Culture; she knew Lewis, and is often associated with the Inklings. In contemporary classical education, she is at turns revered and reviled. I find myself torn when asked to submit an essay about Dorothy Sayers as a moral apologist. I think she deserves the term, but I cannot bring myself to unreservedly praise her.

As a new teacher at Thales Academy, I read Sayers’s essay “The Lost Tools of Learning” in an attempt to discern the nature of “classical education.”1 2 I experienced the classical renewal movement as first a homeschool student and then a graduate of StoneBridge School. Hillsdale College, during the four years I studied there, rarely used the language of classical education, instead emphasizing almost exclusively “liberal arts.” When I turned to Sayers’s “Lost Tools,” I found a clear framework: classical education meant her understanding of “the Trivium.” Grammar, logic, and rhetoric named clear stages that easily mapped onto elementary, middle, and high school stages. Each stage had a core pedagogy: factual memorization, logical debate (also confusingly called dialectic), and public oration (or presentation of a research paper). The model seemed clear, and I found it helpful for making sense of my middle school courses.

As the years went on, I found that Sayers’s model no longer described my approach to teaching. My seventh graders did not need to wait until high school to begin practicing rhetoric, nor did they need to abandon memorization. I talked with elementary school teachers who wanted to incorporate Socratic Seminar into their fifth grade advanced reading groups. Introducing this Logic-stage pedagogy early might, they thought, soften the transition from Grammar-stage. I had an epiphany: all three pedagogies were happening at each stage. Grammar, logic, and rhetoric require each other when considered as stages of education and pedagogical emphases.

My respect for “Lost Tools,” and the veneration with which classical educators spoke of Sayers, became further complicated by teaching medieval history in both seventh and eleventh grade contexts. I dug into the history and practice of liberal education, trying to understand how exactly the cathedral school differed from the early university, and how both contributed to the rise of the modern school. I learned that Plato did not write about the seven liberal arts; instead, he divided education into “musical” and “gymnastic” approaches.3 Medieval Christian academics like Alcuin of York and Hugh of St. Victor wrote about the liberal arts, and for them grammar was not just an academic approach emphasizing memorizing knowledge; it was a beautiful, glorious subject that unlocked the mysteries of language. Logic was actually about logic, not just the dialectical interrogation of propositions. I read Quintillian and Cicero; rhetoric was not an age or method describing the ability to sustain free inquiry. It was a distinct way of arranging speeches for persuasion, and the mastery of such a discipline took years. The more I learned about the quadrivium, the more Sayers’s elevation of the Trivium struck me as an unintentional distortion of knowledge: the humanities alone are not sufficient for fully understanding reality. Much as I prefer novels and poems to lab reports and equations, the physicists and biologists and chemists have deep truths about reality I need to better understand. “Lost Tools,” I concluded, was insufficient to ground a full recovery of traditional education.

I can hear Sean Hadley objecting from his research carrel at Georgetown University: “Wait, Josh. You’re misjudging Sayers.” And he’s right. Because Sayers never intended to establish an American wing of alternative education. Her essay began as a “Paper read at a Vacation Course in Education” the summer of 1947. Rather than proposing how Christian parents could disciple their children, Sayers focused on the success of Nazi propaganda, pondering how English schools could better educate children. She was no educator herself; she was an academic proposing a theory. Christian parents in 1980s America found her essay, and saw in it a blueprint for better education than public schools offered. “The Lost Tools of Learning” lies behind the founding of the Logos School in Idaho, Cair Paravel High School in Kansas, and Highlands Latin School in Kentucky. Such is the accident of history; an academic wrote an essay, and people actually read it.

In recent years, my career has taken me down a path to further appreciate the argument Sayers makes in “Lost Tools.” I’ve moved from teaching and administrating in Thales Academy to overseeing the Classical Education undergraduate program at Thales College. Teaching this program has steeped me in the literature of contemporary classical education: David Hicks’ Norms and Nobility, Charlotte Mason’s Philosophy of Education, Mortimer Adler’s Paideia Proposal, Karen Glass’s Consider This, Richard Gamble’s excellent anthology The Great Tradition. I’ve spent time with the CiRCE Institute, Society for Classical Learning, and Association for Christian Classical Schools; I’ve tracked the growth of Great Hearts Academies, Hillsdale’s K-12 network, and Thales Academy. I developed Thales College’s Certificate in Classical Education Philosophy to help form teachers grounded in the classical tradition. All of this study and experience continues raising a core question: Must classical education be Christian? Answering this question has everything to do with the continued growth of the classical renewal movement, and the possibilities unlocked by school choice bills across the United States. Dorothy L. Sayers provides a helpful perspective that definitively places her in the ranks of moral apologists.

If one looks to the two largest professional organizations for classical education, the Association for Classical Christian Schools and the Society for Classical Learning, classical education flows out of the Christianization of the best of ancient civilization. Contemporary classical schools are seeking to educate sons and daughters of the Most High God to exercise the fullness of their embodied selves, with souls regenerated by Jesus and filled with the Holy Spirit. These schools are generally small, independent, and focused on educating the children of Christian families.

On the other hand, if one looks at three of the largest national groups of classical schools, there is another answer. Great Hearts Academies and Hillsdale College’s network of K-12 schools, both networks of public charter academies in multiple states, look to classical education as a method of forming ideal citizens. Thales Academy, a network of private, non-sectarian classical schools in three states, upholds the virtuous person who fulfills his natural potential as the goal. Both in charter and private form, secular classical education has an existent wing that believes it can replace mainstream progressive education. But to do so requires a broad pluralism.

Are these two views contradictory? Or is there a way to harmonize them? Sayers illustrates the tension faced by classical education, and the distinction of goods secular and Christian classical education can achieve. Towards the end of “Lost Tools,” she describes Christian theology as the “Mistress-science, without which the whole educational structure will necessarily lack its final synthesis.”4 At the culmination of the rhetoric stage, the student is prepared to study sacred theology as the source of revealed truth. In this claim, Sayers reveals an intriguing possibility, one that limits the extent of secular classical education’s effectiveness.

Christian classical educators have the “mistress-science” of theology to ground their philosophical reflections. This highest knowledge answers the ultimate educational questions: “Why do I need to study X?” “Which works should we read?” “What is the human person?” Christian theology equips the classical educators with answers to these questions and many more. Secular classical education often ignores these questions. It remains true, as Socrates observed, that most people live unexamined lives. Plenty of teachers and students progress through a curriculum without asking such primary questions as “Should human nature include X? Which actions are right, which wrong, and why?” For such teachers and students, classical education can achieve a certain limited good. Students will still read the great books, become familiar with the warp and weft of Western history, and even become proficient at reading Ovid in Latin. But they remain deaf to the call of David Hicks’s “Ideal Type.” Consider one representative passage from Norms and Nobility:

The past instructs us that man has only understood himself and mastered himself in pursuit of a self-transcendent Ideal, a Golden Fleece, a Promised Land, a Holy Grail, a numinous windmill. He defines himself in the quest, not on Kalypso’s unblown isle, where he is only judged against himself, where all obstacles are removed, where the question of human significance seems insignificant, and where there are no moral restraints or binding ideals. On Kalypso’s idyllic estate, Odyssean man is a nobody. He languishes in egocentric frustration, self-doubt, and insecurity. In many ways, he is a portrait of the modern student, seated “on the vacant beach with a shattered heart, scanning the sea’s bare horizon with wet eyes” (Fitzgerald 1963). Only Odysseus’ knowledge of the past — his longing for Ithaka, Penelope, and Telemakhos — keeps him alive; and only the responsibility he takes for that knowledge rescues him from Kalypso’s pointless life of pleasure.5

Hicks illustrates the normative emphasis in classical education, the elements of the tradition that assert there is a certain way to live. This normativity becomes philosophically incoherent without the “mistress science,” the one medievals called the “Queen of the Sciences.” Without theology, philosophy descends into either the inane symbolic discussion of analytic philosophy or the mystical babble of continental philosophy. Theology grounds philosophy, and orients all other subjects as right acts of worship. Christian theology holds together classical education as an education befitting human beings made imago dei; without agreement on whose image humanity is made in, consensus on the nature of civilization remains outside our grasp.

Secular classical education can achieve a distinct set of civilizational goods, yet those goods remain disunified without theology to bring all the parts together. Such a good may well be worth pursuing, but the effective logic class will leave students longing for the philosophical unity a secular classical education cannot provide. Classical education in a post-Christian environment begs several questions directly related to the human person. All the moral questions of homosexuality, transgenderism, and sexual morality become clear when the Mistress-science is able to order human loves in accordance with human nature. In her absence, these questions invite only chaos. The fullness of classical education, Sayers shows, belongs to Christian educators.

Such a conclusion is not meant to diminish the value of secular classical education, but rather to note the distance between secondary and primary goods. Conveying classical education in a secular milieu without engaging the primary questions of human nature is like the Greek custom of watering down wine with dinner; it dilutes the essence. Such an approach requires teachers to bypass the core questions that the very resources of their curriculum trumpet. It reduces classical education to a functional form of education that can equip citizens of a pluralist democracy to uphold their citizenship. Secular classical education is a lesser form of education than one which invites students to see themselves as members of the City of God, eternal beings who sojourn through this world. The impetus of secular classical education recognizes the civilizational successes of past generations, but does not see that success as tied to the synthesis of Greece, Rome, and Jerusalem with modernity.

Sayers closes her essay reflecting on the idea of moral and spiritual capital:

Right down to the nineteenth century, our public affairs were mostly managed, and our books and journals were for the most part written, by people brought up in homes, and trained in places, where [the tradition of Christian scholarship] was alive in the memory and almost in the blood. Just so, many people today who are atheist or agnostic in religion, are governed in their conduct by a code of Christian ethics which is so rooted in their unconscious assumptions that it never occurs to them to question it. But one cannot live on capital forever.6

Civilization depends on the transmission of the substance of moral formation, not just the perpetual living on the moral convictions of previous generations. Classical education, under the aegis of Christianity, can transmit that substance. Without Christianity it can only point to the fragments of past glories.

Where then does Sayers stand in the classical renewal movement? In one sense, she remains controversial. Classical educators eventually find other authors more helpful than Sayers, and studying medieval history makes apparent her simplification of the Trivium. Yet, her contribution to the movement is inescapable. Perhaps her high point is recognizing that the best education, truly excellent education, cannot happen without theological coherence. In that sense, she stands among the ranks of moral apologists even in her educational writings. Certainly, her Mind of the Maker, her plays, and perhaps even her mystery novels place her in this camp. But so too does “Lost Tools.” Sayers reminds us that while goods can be achieved outside of Christendom, they are limited goods. The best of classical education is only accessible to those who submit to the lordship of Christ; for that reason, Dorothy L. Sayers fits with the moral apologists of the mid-20th century.

Notes:

1 Dorothy Sayers. “The Lost Tools of Learning,” Hibbert Journal: A Quarterly Review of Religion, Theology, and Philosophy 46 (Oct 1947-July 1948): 2-20, https://www.pccs.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/06/LostToolsOfLearning-DorothySayers.pdf

2 For readers outside the classical education movement, it may be helpful to know that this essay (that Sayers wrote as a vacation course paper) is typically handed to new teachers as an entry point to defining “classical education.” For many in the education world, it is the only Sayers writing they know.

3 Kevin Clark and Ravi Scott Jain, The Liberal Arts Tradition: A Philosophy of Classical Christian Education (Camp Hill: Classical Academic Press, 2021), 24-32. Clark and Jain do an excellent job describing the nuances of musical and gymnastic education.

4 Sayers, “The Lost Tools of Learning,” 14.

5 David Hicks, Norms and Nobility: A Treatise on Education (Lanham: University Press of America, 1999), 51.

6 Sayers, “The Lost Tools of Learning,” 20.