When the history of the Christian Classical Education movement is written, the central figure will surely be Pastor Douglas Wilson. The Association of Classical Christian Schools, which he founded, includes even more member schools than Pastor Wilson has written books—and that is saying something. Over the past half-century, through the institutions and associations he has created, the essays, articles, and polemics he has written, and the sheer force of his personality, Pastor Wilson has helped guide the educations of tens of thousands of Americans.
In 1991, Pastor Wilson published Recovering the Lost Tools of Learning: An Approach to Distinctively Christian Education. This book remains the blueprint for Christian Classical Education across America. Its title was inspired by “The Lost Tools of Learning,” a 1947 lecture by Dorothy L. Sayers (1893-1957). Outside Pastor Wilson’s movement, Sayers is mostly known, if at all, as the author of some moderately entertaining detective stories. Her translations of Dante for Penguin Classics are still in print, but so dated as to seem older than the medieval original.
