Dorothy Sayers Is the Answer to John Dewey
24th August 2026
As we look back at the last century, it can seem that the Liberal Arts model deteriorated through factors like neglect, laziness, or mission creep. But the reality was strikingly different. This older model of education was not misplaced; it suffered a planned and deliberate attack. The leading educators of the last century turned on the Liberal Arts program and tried to gut it. The central voice in this attack was John Dewey, but other educators, like the Developmentalists, joined him in that work. Their primary criticism was that the older Liberal Arts model could not accommodate new research done in child development. Into the middle of this pedagogical revolution, Dorothy Sayers stepped up in 1947 and defended the Liberal Arts program in her work The Lost Tools of Learning. In her defense of the liberal arts, Sayers both acknowledged the factor of childhood development and offered a way for Classical education to deal with these criticisms. In this way, Sayers did not merely defend the Liberal Arts program but also, and more importantly, offered a way for Classical education to disarm Dewey’s project.
The chief virtue of the old paradigm of the Liberal education (i.e. “The Liberal Arts”) is that they made sure everybody going through this form of paideia would have a deep knowledge of language and a facility with basic mathematics.
What were the Liberal Arts?
The Trivium was Grammar, Logic, and Rhetoric. The graduates of the Trivium knew how language worked, how reasoning worked, and how persuasion worked. Those are the skills we most miss in the modern world. The Boomer generation was the last tranche of the population to get any substantial training in these three areas.
Our Constitution was devised by people who were thus educated, and devised for people who were thus educated; and the Founders couldn’t have imagined that education would be so corrupted as to deviate from these goals.
Note: THESE WERE GOALS. They aren’t related to ‘childhood development’ except insofar as a stage of ‘scientific’ childhood development will inform how these goals are reached at certain ages. The goals themselves remain. And the goals themselves were what ‘progressive’ education corrupted and eventually abandoned.
The Quadrivium was Arithmetic, Geometry, Music, and Astronomy. Arithmetic was facility with number per se, Geometry was facility with number in space, Music was facility with number in time, and Astronomy was facility with number in time and space. As you can see, almost all of modern mathematics can fit one of these four categories.
The British university system (which was, until Wokeness corrupted it, far superior to the German research-institution concept adopted in America) basically continued this system and doubled down. The standard British university program was classics and mathematics. (Our SAT and ACT tests for getting into college still reflect this division.)
Classics was based on Latin and Greek but involved not only language and literature but also history, philosophy, drama, poetry, and culture broadly conceived, which are still the foundation of Western civilization. “There is nothing new under the sun.” If you knew how people handled problems in the past, you had a clue as to how to handle those problems when they (or similar problems) arose in the future. Learning Latin and Greek in depth rewires your brain; this carries forward into real life even when you don’t realize it. I can vouch for that from personal experience. Mathematics was every mathematical area beyond the Quadrivium basics,
These two programs were intended to produce well-rounded, well-educated individuals who could be depended on to handle pretty much anything that came their way—and did. This system produced soldiers, sailors, industrialists, scientists, politicians, diplomats, clergymen, financiers, entrepreneurs, agronomists, and made 19th-century Britain the wonder of the world.
Compare that with the Turd World country into which Britain has degenerated in the 20th and 21st centuries.