North is Not Always Up (Why We Chose Homeschool)

Has it ever struck you as odd, or unfortunate, that today, when the proportion of literacy is higher than it ever has been, people should have become susceptible to the influence of advertisement and mass propaganda to an extent hitherto unheard of or unimagined? . . . Have you ever, in listening to the debate among adult and presumably responsible people,been fretted by the extraordinary inability of the average debater to speak to the question, or to meet and refute the arguments of the speakers of the other side?
. . . And when you think of this, and think that most of our public affairs are settled by debates and committees, have you ever felt a certain sinking of the heart? . . . Is not the great defect of our education today--a defect traceable through all the disquieting symptoms of trouble that I have mentioned--that although we often succeed in teaching our pupils "subjects," we fail lamentably on the whole in teaching them how to think: they learn everything, except the art of learning.

--Dorothy L. Sayers
"The Lost Tools of Learning"