In 1921, Benson’s, an advertising firm in London, hired Dorothy L. Sayers to generate ideas and write copy. Her slogans appeared on billboards and magazines throughout England. Sayers learned that advertising works because the average consumer is too gullible to see through the gimmicks. Years later, she lamented society’s naiveté in a short pamphlet entitled, “The Lost Tools of Learning”:

Has it ever struck you as odd, or unfortunate, that to-day, when the proportion of literacy throughout Western Europe is higher than it has ever been, people should have become susceptible to the influence of advertisement and mass-propaganda to an extent hitherto unheard-of and unimagined?1

Gullibility is only a symptom; the core problem, according to Sayers, is an educational system that graduates students unable to learn on their own: “[A]lthough we often succeed in teaching our pupil’s ‘subjects,’ we fail lamentably on the whole in teaching them how to think . . . They learn everything, except the art of learning.”2

Sayers was no novice to learning. She was one of the first women to graduate from Oxford University where she studied medieval literature. She taught before joining Benson’s and never gave up her literary interest; later in life Sayers produced a scholarly, modern translation of Dante’s Divine Comedy. Although her Lord Peter Wimsey mystery novels made her famous, Sayers is of special interest to believers for her writings in Christian apologetics. Here she stressed that learning and faith are intertwined. Sayers “regarded education as a matter for the whole man, as she regarded Christianity as a whole man’s faith. This faith has, after all, a content to be assimilated, and this assimilation requires a properly instructed mind.”3

Such a mind, asserted Sayers, would be educated in a system modeled after the medieval “Trivium,” a three stage process. Children would begin with “grammar” where they would learn the rudiments of a foreign language (preferably Medieval Latin) and exercise their minds through rote memorization. They enter the second stage, “dialectic,” once they can think abstractly. Here, the student moves from memorizing facts to making logical arguments. In the last stage, “rhetoric,” eloquence and style are demanded and, through a final thesis, the student showcases his ability to teach himself. As she put it, “To learn six subjects without remembering how they were learnt does nothing to ease the approach to the seventh; to have learnt and remembered the art of learning makes the approach to every subject an open door.”4

Sayers was not interested in an educated society for education’s sake; nor was her concern the credulity of consumers. She had an evangelistic heart, and “the art of learning” was essential in a world where countless unbelievers depend upon Christian ethics for daily living but ignore the core Christian beliefs upon which their morality depends: “[M]any people to-day who are atheist or agnostic in religion, are governed in their conduct by a code of Christian ethics which is so rooted in their unconscious assumptions that it never occurs to them to question it.”5

Critical thinking is good for the spread of the gospel since the Christian faith—while not dependent upon reason—is, nonetheless, a reasonable faith.6 Those Christians who carefully offer a reason for the hope that is in them (1 Pet. 3:15) will want their listeners to think well, and this means being able to think for oneself. As Sayers put it, “the sole true end of education is simply this: to teach men how to learn for themselves; and whatever instruction fails to do this is effort spent in vain.”7 Thus, the art of life-long learning is an important part of the evangelistic task, and a delight.
 
Footnotes:
 
1  Dorothy L. Sayers, “The Lost Tools of Learning,” in A Matter of Eternity, ed. Rosamond Kent Sprague (Grand Rapids, MI: Williams B. Eerdmans Publishing, 1973), 110.
 
2  Ibid., 114.
 
3  Ibid., 13. Most of the essays in A Matter of Eternity deal with Christian themes; for example: “Evil,” “Sin,” “Forgiveness.” Notice, for example, Sayers’ treatment of hell: “The widespread disinclination to-day to take Hell and Heaven seriously results, very largely, from a refusal to take this world seriously. If we are materialists, we look upon man’s life as an event so trifling compared to the cosmic process that our acts and decision have no importance . . . But Christianity says, ‘No. What you do and what you are matters, and matters intensely. It matters now and it matters eternally; it matters to you, and it matters so much to God that it was for Him literally a matter of life and death.'” 85-86.
 
4  Ibid., 131-132. Sayers suggested that the first stage, Grammar, would occupy students aged 9-11; the second stage, Dialectic, students 12-14; and the third, Rhetoric, students 15-16.
 
5  Ibid., 134.
 
6  Theologian, Carl F. H. Henry, put it well, “. . . Christianity has no fears in respect to truth and reason. No philosophy and no religion presses the concern for intellectual and moral integrity more insistently than does the Bible . . . The New Testament does not ask the astronomer, biologist, chemist, philosopher or physicist to check his mind at the door or to violate truth in his discipline as the price of understanding its claims and as accepting its benefits.” Carl F. H. Henry, God, Revelation and Authority, vol. 1 (Wheaton: Crossway Books, 1999), 264.
 
7  Sayers, 135.

Perryville’s First Baptist Church is found on Route 40, one and a half miles east of Route 222 across from Principio Health Center.