An imaginary interview with Dorothy Sayers
(based on The Lost Tools of Learning essay)
So Miss Sayers, in your model the Grammar stage is followed by the Dialectic or Logic stage. But Formal Logic is no longer taught in the schools. Why not?
It has been discredited, partly because we have come to suppose that we are conditioned almost entirely by the intuitive and the unconscious.
Many of us have this sense that it’s
just a waste of time because…well, because we just do! So why do you consider
the “tool of Logic” so important?
We let our young men and women go out unarmed,
in a day when armor was never so necessary. By teaching them all
to read, we have left them at the mercy of the printed word. By
the invention of the film and the radio, we have made certain that no aversion
to reading shall secure them from the incessant battery of words, words,
words. 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.
I really feel that
is so true! . . . er, I mean, I understand perfectly. Can you give us some examples
from the Dialectic stage that show how certain material is, as you say, “doodled” on
with the tool of Logic?
Reading will proceed from narrative and lyric
to essays, argument, and criticism, and the pupil will learn to try his
own hand at writing this kind of thing. Many lessons – on
whatever subject – will take the form of debates; and the place of
individual or choral recitation will be taken by dramatic performances,
with special attention to plays in which an argument is stated in dramatic
form.
History, aided by a simple system of ethics derived from the grammar of theology,
will provide much suitable material for discussion: Was the behavior
of this statesman justified? What was the effect of such an enactment? What
are the arguments for and against this or that form of government?
Argue, argue, argue – the Dialectic
stage doesn’t sound very nice.
It is, of course, highly important that attention
should be focused upon the beauty and economy of a fine demonstration or
a well-turned argument. 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.
There’d be a lot to pounce on at my
house. I’d say that putting the Logic tool in the hands of
kids at this age will very likely render them perfectly intolerable.
My answer is that children of that age are intolerable
anyhow; and that their natural argumentativeness may just as well be canalized
to good purpose as allowed to run away into the sands. It may, indeed,
be rather less obtrusive at home if it is disciplined in school.
For how long should we expect to endure,
I mean enjoy, this stage?
From about age 12-14.
