The Rise of the Bible-Teaching, Plato-Loving, Homeschool Elitists
So what caused conservative evangelicals to reverse themselves on the classics?
It started seven decades ago when, in 1947, Dorothy Sayers presented an essay at Oxford titled “The Lost Tools of Learning.” Sayers, a friend of C.S. Lewis and translator of Dante’s Divine Comedy, was a lover of all things classical and medieval. In her essay, she offered her own psychological-pedagogical spin on an older method of education that was grounded in Latin, the classics, and the formation of reason and discernment. That method, the trivium, offered what Sayers labeled a “coherent scheme of mental training,” one suitable to arm citizens against the “massed propaganda” of the modern world.
Latin for “three paths,” the steps of the trivium—grammar, dialectic (or logic), and rhetoric—were used primarily as a method of language acquisition. Sayers’ savvy move was to link those three ancient steps to the three...