New Century, Old Problems

In her 1947 essay, “Lost Tools of Learning,” British author, Dorothy Sayers asks the following series of questions. See if any of her observations from nearly eighty years ago seem at all relevant today:

Has it ever struck you as odd, or unfortunate, that today, 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? . . . [D]o you sometimes have an uneasy suspicion that the product of modern educational methods is less good than he or she might be at disentangling fact from opinion and the proven from the plausible?

Have you ever, in listening to a 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 speakers on the other side? . . .

Have you ever followed a discussion in the newspapers or elsewhere and noticed how frequently writers fail to define the terms they use? Or how often, if one man does define his terms, another will assume in his reply that he was using the terms in precisely the opposite sense to that in which he has already defined them? . . .

Do you ever find that young people, when they have left school, not only forget most of what they have learnt (that is only to be expected), but forget also, or betray that they have never really known, how to tackle a new subject for themselves? . . .

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.

A Senior Thesis Solution

One of the chief aims of a BCS education is to remedy this situation. And the senior thesis—this final exercise that we ask seniors to complete before graduating—reveals the degree to which students have attained mastery in the use of virtually every “tool of learning” that a classical and Christian education cultivates.

Senior thesis requires students to:

• understand and present a topic of interest to them not merely in terms of their own experience or current events but in terms of the most important historical thinking about their topic

• be precise in defining the crux of historical controversies and to formulate a thesis statement that both addresses a genuine problem and proposes a plausible solution

• joyfully embrace what God’s word teaches about their topic and to weigh the opinions and arguments of men on the scale of God’s truth

• defend their conclusions with strong evidence and logical argument

• acknowledge and refute the strongest objections to their thesis with evidence and argument

• write a clear, well-structured, and persuasive essay that makes the strongest case possible in support of the Truth regarding their topic

• condense and present their work orally to a broader community with credibility (ethos), clarity (logos), and conviction (pathos)

• winsomely field questions and objections regarding their research, conclusions, and evidence from a panel of adults

The Senior Thesis both reveals a student’s mastery of these skills and provides one more opportunity for students to practice with these tools of learning before graduating. In so doing, students use their talents and abilities to challenge the BCS community one final time to think deeply and more biblically about important topics before they embark, well-equipped, on a lifetime of service as bold and obedient ambassadors of Jesus Christ beyond the halls of BCS.