Send us a text

The Lost Tools of Learning, a 1947 lecture delivered at Oxford by Dorothy Sayers, was largely ignored at the time and in England until decades later in the United States, when it became a foundation text of the Classical Christian Education movement. Despite being the lecture that launched 1,000 classical schools, Dorothy Sayers appears to undermine the classical tradition and repeatedly side with educational progressives. Jonathan and Ryan dig into the lecture, its impact on the CCE movement, and some pedagogical alternatives.

Richard M. Gamble’s The Great Tradition: https://bookshop.org/a/25626/9781935191568

Dorothy Sayers’s Lost Tools of Learning: https://www.pccs.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/06/LostToolsOfLearning-DorothySayers.pdf

Dorothy Sayers’s translation of Dante’s Inferno: https://amzn.to/36yr31C

Jonathan Roberts’s Classical Schools Are Not Really Classical: https://ancientlanguage.com/classical-schools-not-classical/

C. Stephen Jaeger’s The Envy of Angels: https://bookshop.org/a/25626/9780812217452

J.R.R. Tolkien’s “On Fairy-Stories”: https://coolcalvary.files.wordpress.com/2018/10/on-fairy-stories1.pdf

C.S. Lewis’s The Abolition of Man: https://bookshop.org/a/25626/9780060652944

New Humanists is brought to you by the Ancient Language Institute: https://ancientlanguage.com/

Links may have referral codes, which earn us a commission at no additional cost to you. We encourage you, when possible, to use Bookshop.org for your book purchases, an online bookstore which supports local bookstores.

Music: Save Us Now by Shane Ivers - https://www.silvermansound.com