Dorothy Sayers Trivium

According to Dorothy Sayers’ essay, the main problem of education was that students were not taught how to learn. Education has failed to teach pupils how to critically think for themselves. The tools of learning have been lost. Even if pupils specialize or master one subject matter and remember what they studied, they forgot how they learned them in the first place. The period of education had also been extended by starting formal school at an earlier age and postponing the completion of high school. Pupils were taught more subjects then, but they didn’t actually know and retain more information.

To remedy this situation, Ms. Sayers proposed that the modern educational system be replaced by the classical model of medieval education. The teachers …show more content…
The curriculum consisted of two parts: The Trivium and the Quadrivium. The Trivium had three stages of learning: Grammar, Dialectic, and Rhetoric, while the Quadrivium was composed of subjects. The Trivium occurred approximately from birth to sixteen years old. The Quadrivium occurred after through college age. Ms. Sayers focused on the Trivium in recovering the lost tools in learning. The Trivium in Latin means "the three ways" or "the three roads" which formed the beginning foundation of a medieval liberal arts education. The Trivium was teaching the students the proper use of the tools of learning or the methods used in dealing with subjects. The first stage of learning in the Trivium was Grammar. It’s similar to learning a new language, its structure, what it was, how it was created, and how it worked. This was also considered the Poll-Parrot age which reflected the natural abilities of young children, to repeat what they heard and learned--to soak in knowledge. In addition, the accumulation of facts and memorization were practiced during this time. The second stage of learning was the Dialectic or Pert stage, in which the students attained understanding of the Grammar information that they previously learned.