The Lost Tools of Learning by Dorothy Sayers

I suppose, in all fairness, that this should not really count as a book, but it was certainly interesting. This is an article/pamphlet based on a talk that Sayers gave at Oxford in 1947.

She deplores the degeneration of education into the teaching of subjects without teaching learning. She says it herself most eloquently. "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. By the invention of 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.We who were scandalised in 1940 when men were sent to fight armoured tanks with rifles, are not scandalised when young men and women are sent into the world to fight massed propaganda with a smattering of "subjects"; and when whole classes and whole nations become hypnotised by the arts of the spell-binder, we have the impudence to be astonished."

If she was horrified then, what would she think now - when in America even the "subject" is no longer taught, only the isolated facts which are "on the test."