An imaginary interview with Dorothy Sayers
(based on The Lost Tools of Learning essay)

Miss Sayers, you identify three stages of learning, which we label Grammar, Logic, and Rhetoric.  How would you describe the Grammar stage?
This stage is the one in which learning by heart is easy and, on the whole, pleasurable.  At this age, one readily memorizes the shapes and appearances of things; one likes to recite the number-plates of cars; one rejoices in the chanting of rhymes and the rumble and thunder of unintelligible polysyllables; one enjoys the mere accumulation of things.

Once a child has learned basic reading and writing skills, what would you identify as foundational for this stage, and why?
I will say at once, quite firmly, that the best grounding for education is the Latin grammar.  I say this, not because Latin is traditional and mediaeval, but simply because even a rudimentary knowledge of Latin cuts down the labor and pains of learning almost any other subject by at least fifty percent.

Most Latin classes, when offered at all, take place at the high school level.  What do you think of that?
Latin should be begun as early as possible--at a time when inflected speech seems no more astonishing than any other phenomenon in an astonishing world; and when the chanting of "Amo, amas, amat" is as ritually agreeable to the feelings as the chanting of "eeny, meeny, miney, moe."

What approach to poems and stories would you suggest in these
early years of schooling?
Verse and prose can be learned by heart, and the pupil's memory should be stored with stories of every kind--classical myth, European legend, and so forth.... Recitation aloud should be practiced, individually or in chorus; for we must not forget that we are laying the groundwork for Disputation and Rhetoric.

Let’s say we hire you to take on a 3rd or a 5th grade history class. 
What will you teach the students?
Dates, events, anecdotes, and personalities.  A set of dates to which one can peg all later historical knowledge is of enormous help later on in establishing the perspective of history.  It does not greatly matter which dates…, provided that they are accompanied by pictures of costumes, architecture, and other everyday things, so that the mere mention of a date calls up a very strong visual presentment of the whole period…; and I believe that the discredited and old-fashioned memorizing of a few capitol cities, rivers, mountain ranges, etc., does no harm.

What if you were teaching them science – what would you focus on?
Collections--the identifying and naming of specimens and, in general, the kind of thing that used to be called "natural philosophy."  To know the name and properties of things is, at this age, a satisfaction in itself; to recognize a devil's coach-horse at sight, and assure one's foolish elders, that, in spite of its appearance, it does not sting; to be able to pick out Cassiopeia and the Pleiades, and perhaps even to know who Cassiopeia and the Pleiades were; to be aware that a whale is not a fish, and a bat not a bird.

Is there a “grammar” of mathematics?
The grammar of Mathematics begins, of course, with the multiplication table, which, if not learnt now, will never be learnt with pleasure; and with the recognition of geometrical shapes and the grouping of numbers.  These exercises lead naturally to the doing of simple sums in arithmetic.

Thank you, Miss Sayers.  You’re hired.