{"id":1955,"date":"2021-03-20T06:35:45","date_gmt":"2021-03-20T11:35:45","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/educationalrenaissance.com\/?p=1955"},"modified":"2023-05-06T10:35:32","modified_gmt":"2023-05-06T15:35:32","slug":"human-development-part-2-all-the-worlds-a-stage","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/educationalrenaissance.com\/2021\/03\/20\/human-development-part-2-all-the-worlds-a-stage\/","title":{"rendered":"Human Development, Part 2: All the World’s a Stage"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

That one essay \u2013 you know the one that got this whole educational renewal movement going \u2013 needs to be reevaluated. I am talking about the essay \u201cThe Lost Tools of Learning\u201d by Dorothy Sayers. Her approach reminds me of Galadriel\u2019s speech in the prologue to The Lord of the Rings<\/em> movies, \u201cMuch that once was is lost. For none now live who remember it.\u201d Someone who remembers the way things were must pass that knowledge down or else it is forever lost to the detriment of future generations. “And some things that should not have been forgotten were lost.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Previous article in the series, Human Development<\/em>:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Part 1: What Do You Have in Mind?<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Dorothy Sayers and the Lost Classical Tradition<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
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Although not properly a member of the Inklings \u2013 the informal literary society gathered around Tolkien and Lewis \u2013 Dorothy Sayers was an esteemed member of the British literati in her day and frequently shared her works with Lewis and Tolkien. Best known for her detective novels, Sayers was likewise a first-rate essayist, critic and scholar. She was among the group of women upon whom degrees were first granted at Oxford in 1920. Her writings rarely directly address education, although learned figures like Lord Peter Wimsey and Harriet Vane opine from time to time on the subject. It was in 1947 that Sayers addressed an audience in Oxford on the subject of education, a presentation later published under the title \u201cThe Lost Tools of Learning.\u201d It wasn\u2019t until the 1990s that her educational vision took hold, and then not in her native England, but in America of all places.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

At the heart of her address is a maneuver to map the medieval trivium upon three stages of development. The trivium denotes three of the seven liberal arts (grammar, logic and rhetoric), or what we might call the language arts. Our educational renewal movement has devoted much attention to figuring out what these three arts are and how to teach them effectively. Sayers refers to three stages of development, designating them as the Poll-parrot stage (the youngest learners), the Pert stage (middle grades), and the Poetic stage (after puberty sets in). This designation directly led to classical schools adopting titles such as Grammar school (usually Kindergarten through grade five or six), Logic school (grades five or six through eight) and Rhetoric school (high school), for better or worse. This pairing of the liberal arts trivium and stages of development became so powerful within the classical education movement that it is common to find school websites that describe the trivium as the learning stages of children.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

A Critique of Sayers\u2019 Stages<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
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In his 2019 article \u201cDorothy Sayers Was Wrong: The Trivium and Child Development<\/a>\u201d on the Circe Institute blog, Shawn Barnett challenges Sayers\u2019 correlation of the trivium and stages of child development. He rightly identifies how Sayers was responding to the state of educational reform that overly focused on teaching facts in more specialized subject areas. Elsewhere I have referred to and critiqued the factory model of education<\/a> (particularly as developed in Seth Godin\u2019s book Linchpin<\/em>), and inasmuch as this was what Sayers was responding to, we have found her to be helpful in our day to formulate a renewal of education along classical lines. I share Barnett’s concern that we not be so overly reactionary to the state of conventional education that we warp our understanding of what classical education is.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Despite Sayers’ clarion call to rediscover the lost tools of learning \u2013 that is the classical liberal arts \u2013 Barnett takes to task her developmental stages understanding of the trivium as anachronistic. Barnett writes, \u201cmedieval educational theorists never conceived of the trivium in terms of developmental stages that roughly correspond to a student\u2019s age.\u201d He correctly assesses the ahistorical nature of her essay in that childhood stages of development were never in view during the Middle Ages. He further rightly points out that most of the trivium was taught to university students, not to children. I leave aside Barnett\u2019s discussion of Medieval curriculum as I am certain he is correct that we must take special care to select the best texts for our curricular content. I don\u2019t know that Sayers would disagree with this point. My sense is that Sayers was less interested in spelling out specifically what children should read at what age, but instead giving general guidance that the liberal arts trivium is the answer to the problem of an overly specialized model of education that emerged after WWII with undue focus on technicism<\/a> and scientism<\/a>. Medieval education never thought of education in developmental terms, and Barnett demonstrates that Sayers’ is completely anachronistic on this point.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Yet where I think Barnett\u2019s critique misses the mark is that the punchline of Sayers\u2019 joke is exactly that it is anachronistic. We can hear even in her naming of the stages of childhood (Poll-parot, Pert, Poet) an element of humor or levity. Her appeal to the old guard Oxonians in her audience is that the antiquated trivium can be dusted off to meet the needs of modern education. She is not calling us to return to the Middle Ages. When we truly understand the Western cultural heritage as something like open source software, there are ways we can update something like the trivium today. Keep in mind that the Medieval version of the trivium as it existed in the universities was an updated version harking back to the classical era. In fact when we attempt to identify exactly what we are talking about when we look for a classical analogue, we are really looking at a centuries old tradition that grew, developed and changed in a dynamic relationship with the prevailing culture of the eras in which it existed.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

What Sayers provides through her anachronistic paring of the trivium and child development theory is an attempt to link the deep magic of the classical liberal arts tradition with the cutting edge of modern research. One can clearly see the influence of Piaget in Sayer\u2019s thinking. Piaget\u2019s breakthrough work on child cognitive development was first published in French in 1936 and then translated into English in 1952. Because his work corresponded roughly to Rousseau\u2019s four stages of child development in Emile<\/em> (1762), Piaget\u2019s ideas spread fairly rapidly. Yet Sayers never refers to Piaget, nor Rousseau for that matter. Her three-part schema seems not to be based on Piaget\u2019s four-part schema, but this may be more down to her desire to fit the schema to the trivium than a lack of awareness of the Rousseau\/Piaget four-part schema.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Piaget\u2019s work on childhood cognitive development was the cutting edge science of Sayers\u2019 day. So one major take away from her essay has to do with the nature of her argument. For the classical liberal arts to inform and influence education today, it must be conversant with modern research. In hindsight, we can see how there is a tension between the classical tradition and advances in research. Yet, that tension enables us to explore the ways we can gain insights into the craft of teaching. To that end, let\u2019s examine further Piaget\u2019s theory of childhood cognitive development and the ways it influences neurobiology and cognitive science today.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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