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| Dorothy L. Sayers |
I have often said that education in Spain has worsened over the last fifty years. Almost whenever the government has changed, a new education law has been promulgated that, without exception, has always been worse than the previous one. The duration of learning has been lengthened. In 1963, I entered the university when I had just turned 17. Today nobody arrives there without having turned 18. Sometimes it is argued that children must learn more and need more time. It may be true, but do they really know more when they get to the university?
The answer to this question is undoubtedly negative. When they get to the university, the level of the students is low, they are not able to reason and sometimes they don’t even understand what they read. They are getting easier to manipulate. Perhaps this is what is intended.
Faced with this situation, let
us take a look at the most widely used educational system during the European
Middle Ages. It consisted of seven subjects, divided into two large groups. The
first (the Trivium)
encompassed three subjects: Grammar, Dialectics, and Rhetoric. The second (the Quadrivium) comprised the other four:
Arithmetic, Geometry, Astronomy, and Music (i.e., science and art). These
subjects seem to us normal, because they resemble those taught in
our schools and universities. The same does not happen with the first three,
especially with the second and the third. And yet, these three subjects were
basic (and that’s why they were learnt before), for their objective was to
teach students to reason, debate and express themselves correctly.
In an article (The Lost Tools of Learning)
written in 1948, but perfectly applicable today, Dorothy L. Sayers wrote this:
[A]lthough we often succeed in teaching
our pupils "subjects," we fail lamentably on the whole in teaching
them how to think. They learn everything, except the art of learning.
Sayers argues that
current teaching has forgotten what should be taught, something that they did
know in the Middle Ages. And she sums up the consequences of this failure in
the following devastating words:
For we let our young men and women go
out unarmed, in a day when armour was never so necessary. By teaching them all
to read, we have left them at the mercy of the printed word… They do not know
what the words mean; they do not know how to ward them off or blunt their edge
or fling them back; they are a prey to words in their emotions instead of being
the masters of them in their intellects… We dole out lip-service to the
importance of education—lip-service and, just occasionally, a little grant of
money; we postpone the school leaving-age… and yet, as I believe, all this
devoted effort is largely frustrated, because we have lost the tools of
learning, and in their absence can only make a botched and piecemeal job of it.
How did they teach
to think in the Middle Ages? With the Trivium.
Grammar taught them what words mean and how they should be used. Dialectics, to
reason and debate. Rhetoric, to express themselves correctly, verbally and in
writing.
Grammar, as defined by Saint Isidore of Seville, is the ability to speak. Grammar was then broader
than we think today. Still in the days of the Roman Empire, Quintilian asserts that
the correct translation of the Greek word grammatike was the
Latin word literatura. As C.S. Lewis wrote in his book The Discarded Image, which deals with medieval
culture, Grammar included syntax, etymology,
prosody, and explanation of allusions. Isidore also includes history among the
departments of Grammar.
Dialectics teaches to reason, to discuss, to distinguish true
statements from false ones, and how to prove they are true or false. It includes
Logic and the art of discussion. This art is very necessary now, but
unfortunately it has been abandoned. Today, as Sayers points out, the detection
of logical fallacies is the only way to defend ourselves from the huge number
of incorrect reasonings proposed to us. In her words:
Criticism must not be merely destructive;
though at the same time both teacher and pupils must be ready to detect
fallacy, slipshod reasoning, ambiguity, irrelevance and redundancy, and to
pounce upon them like rats.
As for Rhetoric, it tried to
develop an elegant and appropriate style in spoken and written texts. Rhetoric
is the most practical of the arts.
Sayers states that the three subjects of
the Trivium adapt naturally to the development of the child. In
the first phase, the phase of Grammar, they must master observation and memory,
the latter faculty usually despised today, but necessary and quite important.
In the second, when the children become impertinent, bicker at everything and
lay verbal traps for their elders, they must be taught Dialectics. In the
third, since the beginning of puberty, it would be convenient to teach them Rhetoric.
A personal anecdote: in my role as
honorary professor at the Universidad Autónoma de Madrid, which I have held
since my retirement, in recent years I have imparted a lecture on Rhetoric to
the students of the subject Computer Science and
Society at the Higher Polytechnic School. It seems, from what
other teachers have told me, that the students love this lecture, and say that they
have learned a lot. For, as a result of current teaching methods, university
students do not know how to express themselves in writing, and are eager to
learn.
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