Recent Christian Classical Education Entries:
- Spotlight on the Quadrivium
- What is Classical Education? by Susan Wise Bauer (Link to Susan’s web site)
- Parental Involvement is Key!
- Audio Overview of Classical Christian Education
- What are Grammar, Dialectic, and Rhetoric?
- Why Only the Trivium? by Patch Blakey (Part 1 / Part 2 / Part 3)
A great place to start in understanding what makes an education ”classical” is with an essay written in the last century by Dorothy Sayers. She first presented her ideas at Oxford University in 1947 in a landmark essay called “The Lost Tools of Learning.” While this essay will likely be the subject of several future posts, a good place to begin is with a quote from near the end of her essay:
However firmly a tradition is rooted, if it is never watered, though it dies hard, yet in the end it dies. And today a great number–perhaps the majority–of the men and women who handle our affairs, write our books and our newspapers, carry out our research, present our plays and our films, speak from our platforms and pulpits–yes, and who educate our young people–have never, even in a lingering traditional memory, undergone the Scholastic discipline. Less and less do the children who come to be educated bring any of that tradition with them. We have lost the tools of learning–the axe and the wedge, the hammer and the saw, the chisel and the plane– that were so adaptable to all tasks. Instead of them, we have merely a set of complicated jigs, each of which will do but one task and no more, and in using which eye and hand receive no training, so that no man ever sees the work as a whole or “looks to the end of the work.”
If you wish to read the complete text of the essay, click here for “The Lost Tools of Learning” in its entirety.