My name is Joshua Sheets and I welcome you to a special edition of the Radical Personal Finance

Podcast.

This is a recording of an essay entitled The Lost Tools of Learning by Dorothy Sayers.

This is not intended to be a standalone episode of the show,

but rather I'm simply recording this well-known essay in an audio version to serve as a resource

for other people in the future. I have often wished for an audio version of this essay

for those who don't have the time to sit down and read it in text version and so

that's why I'm recording it and releasing it. It is being released concurrently

with two other episodes that I've done on the history of school as part of the radical personal finance podcast.

If you've received this audio version and you're looking for the file it can be found at radical

personal finance dot com slash lost tools this essay was originally delivered in

1947 by Dorothy Sayers at Oxford University.

Since that time it has been published and republished countless times and is essentially an articulation

of the three so-called lost tools of classical education known as grammar, logic, and

rhetoric. Personally, I don't necessarily subscribe to all of Dorothy Sayer's theories,

but I do think it's an excellent essay for you to consider and to challenge

your thinking on the tools of learning.

The Lost Tools of Learning by Dorothy Sayers

That I, whose experience of teaching is extremely limited, should presume to discuss education is a matter surely that calls for no apology. It is a kind of behavior to which the

present climate of opinion is wholly favorable. Bishops air their opinions

about economics, biologists, about metaphysics, inorganic chemists about theology.

The most irrelevant people are appointed to highly technical ministries and plain blunt men write to the papers to say that Epstein and Picasso do not know how to draw.

...