To keep from being lost in a dark wood, the following might help:

Sayer's Intro from Hell

A Mental Compass to keep at hand

Environmentalism and Dante: Paradiso, Canto 1

Individualism, Dante and I -- then & today

Dante's Imperial bias and Freedom

 Excerpt from Barbara Reynolds' talk

on Dorothy Sayers' legacy

        I am a generation younger than Dorothy Sayers. In fact, I was born on her twenty-first birthday, on 13 June 1914. My education was similar to hers and it was based on assumptions that have largely been eroded today. The chief of these was that the tradition of Western classical culture was the best possible training for the mind. Associated with this was another assumption: namely, that subjects were worth studying in themselves. The notion that a university education is "wasted" if a graduate does not find a job related to the subject of his or her degree would have been as incomprehensible to her generation as it would have been to mine. How could admittance to the world of scholarship and intellectual enquiry ever be wasted?

         People make free with the term "privilege," applying it resentfully to the minority who had access to universities in earlier times. I would agree that Dorothy Sayers and her fellow graduates were privileged, not because they were wealthy, for most of them were not, but because of the implicit assumption in their time that subjects intrinsically of value set their minds and talents free to enter into permanent possession of a tradition and heritage. "Vocational education," she wrote, "is the education of slaves." Educationists of today continue to be confused about this, being increasingly influenced by political interests and the market-led approach, in which children and parents are seen as consumers, schools as competitive business, teachers as technicians and higher educational institutions as factories. It is difficult now, at least in England, not to be discouraged by the present limiting views of politicians who are denying future generations the right to self-fulfillment in intellectual discovery and achievement.

         Delight in the creative power of the mind was something which characterized Dorothy Sayers all her life. This can be seen clearly in her childhood and school-day memoirs and in her adult correspondence, as well as in all her creative works, and I had the privilege over a period of eleven years of being exhilarated by it in her letters to me and in our conversations. In this respect, she was characteristic of her period, as well as being in this and many other ways individually outstanding.

         The declaration of war on 3 September 1939 awakened her to the importance of harnessing intellectual vitality in the service of freedom. This is a vision which I now perceive to be one of her most important legacies and of still urgent relevance to us today.

Reynolds' talk on: "The Importance of being Dorothy Sayers"

         Given today's assesment-driven education, with jobs-money-career as the outcome called "successful", one might profit from over a thousand years of history in China. The Civil Service Exam, which standardized Confucian teaching and produced unthinking bureaucrats by the millions, could offer us a picture of our future: If we continue down this path of destroying the critical-thinking and analytical reading of traditional Liberal Arts teaching, commoditize higher education, then welcome to the most conservative culture on earth! Read on about this topic in this article:

"Chronic Consequences of High-Stakes Testing? Lessons from
the Chinese Civil Service Exam" BY HOI K. SUEN AND LAN YU.