6 A Love of Learning: C.S. Lewis on Education
6
A Love of Learning: C.S. Lewis on Education
For every one pupil who needs to be guarded from a weak excess of sensibility there are three who need to be awakened from the slumber of cold vulgarity. The task of the modern educator is not to cut down jungles but to irrigate deserts.
C.S. Lewis, The Abolition of Man
One of Lewis’s most trenchant books is The Abolition of Man, written in the depths of the Second World War. This work seethes with anger. A barely controlled rage permeates its pages. The subject which provokes Lewis’s extended anger is reflected in the book’s somewhat dull subtitle: ‘Reflections on Education with Special Reference to the Teaching of English in the Upper Forms of Schools’.
Why is education such a troubling subject? Why did Lewis get so angry in such a dull book, which might well have won a prize for having the most boring title ever invented? Lewis would tell us that the answer is simple: what we believe (or what we are taught to believe) has a massive impact on our values and actions. Lewis felt very strongly about this. He might have hammered our lunch table with his fists in frustration about approaches to education that were designed to suppress our deepest instincts about right and wrong, and open the way to an insipid moral relativism.
In The Abolition of Man, Lewis sets out to ridicule approaches to education that he believes are designed to produce ‘men without chests’ – people without any grounding in reality, unable to embrace good on the one hand and identify and reject evil on the other. How could someone resist the evil of Nazism without a firm grasp of what is right and what is wrong?
If we were facing a world war and Nazism, as Lewis was, our first instinct probably would not be to discuss the purpose of education, as Lewis did. Yet Lewis had understood the supreme importance of education in shaping our lives and values. ‘What’s the purpose of education?’ isn’t a question asked by idle people, safely ensconced in ivory towers, as we might suppose. Lewis insists it’s a question on which our lives – and functioning societies – rest.
The Abolition of Man was prophetic, and is still resonant today. Lewis rejects the idea that education serves only ‘instrumentalist’ purposes – that education is simply about teaching students certain skills. He also exposes the inadequacy of superficial approaches to education which reject objective moral values. Lewis ridicules those who debunk traditional values and instead uncritically adopt whatever values happen to be fashionable at the time. ‘Their scepticism about values is on the surface: it is for use on other people’s values; about the values current in their own set they are not nearly sceptical enough.’1 And this superficial approach neglects the wisdom of the past by focusing on the passing whims of the present – which are mistakenly assumed to be definitive and permanent. Lewis concludes that while people long for leaders who are virtuous and trustworthy, modern education undermines these qualities by affirming moral relativism. We ‘clamour for those very qualities we are rendering impossible’.2
So if these views are wrong, what is education all about? We might be tempted to ignore Lewis’s strong opinions and dismiss the topic of education altogether, considering it the province of professionals. But Lewis insists that we realise the urgency of this question because how we view education has long-lasting effects, not just on our distinctly educational contexts – like our own schooling or that of our children – but on our outlook in life. It’s the difference between utility and virtue. Many policy-makers now think of education in functional terms. It’s about learning skills that will help students find employment – such as using a word processor or spreadsheet. Yet what about helping people to figure out the meaning of life? Or become good people? Or make a difference to others? Is education for a stage in life, completed once we find jobs, or should it be a lifelong pursuit?
Lewis stands for an older, more classical approach to education, which has been ignored rather than refuted. This vision of education aims to help people to love the good and hate the bad. Its aim is to help people become good and wise in all spheres of life, not simply to acquire knowledge or skills. Lewis is a prophetic voice in the face of fashionable educational trends, and we need to listen to him carefully.
But rather than get involved in a detailed discussion about The Abolition of Man, let’s try to grasp Lewis’s vision for education and see what we can learn from it. So let’s imagine we are having lunch with Lewis. He steers the conversation towards the purpose and value of education. Where should we start? Perhaps the most obvious icebreaker is to ask Lewis to tell us how he himself came to be part of the world of education.
Lewis’s Educational Career
Lewis’s academic career was linked with England’s greatest and oldest universities – Oxford and Cambridge. We don’t know why Lewis decided to apply to study classics at Oxford University in 1916. What we do know is that he was absolutely convinced of the importance of learning and that this conviction ripened and deepened throughout his life. Although we mainly think of Lewis as an author, we need to remember that his professional calling was to teach English literature at Oxford and Cambridge.
Like most universities established during the Middle Ages, Oxford and Cambridge were ‘collegiate’. They consisted of federations of autonomous colleges, with a central university administration. Students and academics at Oxford were invariably linked with a specific college, which was their main base of operations. Oxford colleges were not ‘halls of residence’, but independent societies of fellows and students. Lewis was linked with three colleges during his lifetime: University College, Oxford; Magdalen College, Oxford; and Magdalene College, Cambridge.
Lewis’s academic career began at University College, Oxford, where he studied the philosophy, languages and history of the classical world. He then took a second undergraduate degree in English language and literature, cramming a three-year programme into a single year. It was obvious that Lewis was an outstanding student. By 1923, he had achieved the remarkable distinction of a ‘triple first’ – that is, gaining first-class honours at every stage of the assessment process. Lewis initially hoped to be a philosopher. His obvious talents led to his being employed as a tutor in philosophy at University College while the philosophy fellow spent a sabbatical year in the United States. Yet Lewis ended up a scholar of literature. In 1925, he was appointed as the tutorial fellow in English at Magdalen College, Oxford, one of the university’s oldest, wealthiest and most prestigious colleges.
Lewis developed a specialist interest in the literature of the Middle Ages and Renaissance. His first major book established him as a commanding presence in the field. The Allegory of Love (1936) was recognised as outstanding by his academic colleagues, and the British Academy awarded Lewis the prestigious Sir Israel Gollancz Prize in 1937. Other scholarly works flowed from his pen.
Pen? Yes. Lewis never used a typewriter. He was born with a problem with his thumb joints, which made it difficult to type. All of Lewis’s books were written by hand, even if someone else typed them up later. Lewis used the ‘dip-pen’ method. He would dip his fountain pen in a bottle of Quink ink, and then keep writing until the ink ran out – usually after about ten words.
But there was another reason for using this old-fashioned way of writing. Lewis felt that the ‘clacking’ of a typewriter would interfere with his sense of rhythm. He wanted to know what a text would sound like when read aloud. Lewis’s emphasis on how texts sounded helps explain his success as a lecturer and broadcaster.
Many believe that Lewis’s gifts as a teacher were seen at their best in his Oxford lectures and tutorials. Lewis rapidly gained a reputation as one of Oxford University’s finest lecturers. Why? Three factors contributed to his remarkable success. First, Lewis was a good speaker. His rich, resonant voice – which one of his students described as a ‘port wine and plum pudding voice’ – was easy to listen to. While Lewis scored highly on this point, some of his Oxford colleagues were much less fortunate. J.R.R. Tolkien had a weak voice, which his audiences found uninteresting. Happily, Tolkien proved to be a more effective writer than he was a speaker!
Second, Lewis usually spoke without notes. Where he did use notes, these were minimal – for example, a brief list of quotes to be used, or points to be made. Lewis had a remarkable ability to remember texts – including both literary classics and his own lecture notes. Lewis’s critic William Empson remarked that Lewis ‘was the best read man of his generation, one who read everything and remembered everything he read’.3 Lewis committed his lectures to memory and was able to dispense with notes. Unlike many Oxford academics, who merely read their lecture scripts aloud, Lewis believed that good communication demanded that he engage with his audiences. In a 1924 letter to his father, Lewis remarked that lectures that were simply read out to their audiences tended to ‘send people to sleep’.4 He realised that he would have to learn to talk to his audiences, not simply recite his lectures to them. His students loved his lecturing style, which contrasted sharply with that of other members of Oxford’s Faculty of English.
Third, Lewis’s lectures were marked by more than their superb delivery. Their content was widely agreed to be remarkable. Lewis seemed to have an ability to grasp and communicate the internal structure of leading works of literature – above all, John Milton’s classic Paradise Lost. Somehow Lewis seemed able to avoid bombarding his students with facts and instead helped them to see the ‘big picture’ offered by writers such as Milton or Edmund Spenser. Where others fussed about points of textual detail, Lewis opened up the great themes that lay behind the writers’ works.
Lewis also served as Magdalen College’s tutor in English. At that point, the heart of Oxford University’s educational method lay in the tutorial system. Each week, undergraduates at Magdalen College studying English would meet with Lewis for an hour. During this time, they would read aloud an essay, which would then be discussed and debated. Lewis’s students at Oxford found themselves forced to defend and develop their ideas. They were not allowed to get away with sweeping generalisations or simplistic assertions. Lewis would stop them and ask them to explain exactly what they meant. And once they explained it, they had to defend it.
Lewis found himself increasingly caught up in the world of academic politics in Oxford, especially within the Faculty of English. Should the curriculum be extended to include more recent writings? Lewis found himself on the wrong side of many of these debates with his colleagues and became increasingly unhappy at Oxford. Happily, a development at Oxford’s great intellectual rival provided a way out of this situation. In 1954, Lewis was appointed as the first holder of a new professorship in Medieval and Renaissance English. His move to Cambridge was remarkably successful and seems to have led to a new lease on life. Recognition of his outstanding talent followed. In July 1955, Lewis was elected a Fellow of the British Academy, the greatest honour a British academic can hope to achieve.
Lewis, then, was widely regarded as an outstanding academic. But what did he think about the process of education itself ? How should it be done? What was it for? What might Lewis want to highlight in our conversation? Let’s focus in on a few themes that Lewis considered to be of major importance.
Chronological Snobbery: Why the Latest Isn’t Always the Best
In our second conversation with Lewis, we noted a quote from Francis Bacon: ‘Old wood best to burn, old wine to drink, old friends to trust, and old authors to read.’ The mature Lewis would have enjoyed this, nodding his head in agreement, especially at the final five words. Yet the young Lewis had little sympathy for the ideas of old authors. He lived in a bright new world. Why mess it up with the failed ideas of the past? An old author was an outdated author, perhaps a relic to be studied but not an adviser to be heeded.
During the 1920s, Lewis became friends with Owen Barfield, an undergraduate at Wadham College. The two young men debated many issues, sometimes playfully, sometimes with frightening intensity. At that time, Lewis had adopted what he called his ‘New Look’ – a way of thinking that was dismissive of the ideas and values of the past.
Lewis might well have agreed with the industrialist Henry Ford, who famously declared that ‘history is bunk’.5 The present has enough problems without worrying about the past. Who wants to be held back by the past when the world is changing so quickly? The past is a liability, not a resource. At best, it’s a waste of time. At worst, it locks us into an outmoded way of thinking. Why not ignore it altogether?
Lewis thought like that in the early 1920s. There was a tension here with Lewis’s interests in the classic world of ancient Greece and Rome. He seems to have thought that you studied Plato and Aristotle mainly to appreciate how much we’ve moved on since then. Like the New Testament, these writers were locked into a bygone age and had little relevance to the brave new world that was opening up in the aftermath of the greatest and most destructive war in the history of humanity.
Yet Barfield persuaded Lewis that he was simply wrong in being so dismissive of the past. Lewis came to see that he had fallen into the trap of ‘chronological snobbery’ – that is, an ‘uncritical acceptance of the intellectual climate common to our own age and the assumption that whatever has gone out of date is on that account discredited’.6 Lewis came to see that the reading of literature – especially older literature – is an important challenge to this kind of ‘chronological snobbery’. The most recent is not necessarily the best. It is still on trial and has yet to be assessed properly.
Lewis’s essay ‘On the Reading of Old Books’ (1944) is especially forceful on this point. He argues that knowledge of the literature of the past provides readers with a seasoned viewpoint, allowing them to see ‘the controversies of the moment in their proper perspective’.7 Reading old books, Lewis continues, helps us avoid becoming captives of the ‘Spirit of the Age’ by keeping ‘the clean sea breeze of the centuries blowing through our minds’.8
For Lewis, people are too easily taken in by the latest cultural and intellectual fashions. Wanting to be ‘up to date’ in their thinking, they uncritically accept the latest ideas they read about in the media. Reading older books, Lewis argues, helps us to realise that ‘basic assumptions have been quite different in different periods’. We need to remember that the ideas we tend to regard as hopelessly old fashioned and out of date were once seen as cutting edge. What was once new and brilliant becomes old and stale. Perhaps Lewis seems a little too scathing when he declares that ‘much which seems certain to the uneducated is merely temporary fashion’.9 Yet his point is fair: much recent thought is fleeting, lacking the staying power to excite and inform later generations.
So is Lewis saying that only old ideas are any good and that new ideas are invariably wrong? No.10 He is asking us to be critical. New ideas need to be looked at carefully. They may be good; they may be bad. But ideas are not automatically good because they are new. Similarly, many – but not all – old ideas have permanent value. They have proved themselves through the centuries and will continue to be important in the future. We need to figure out which ideas and values are of lasting importance, and hold fast to them.
Let’s look at an example to help us understand what Lewis has in mind. Lewis became an Oxford don in the mid-1920s. At this time, the British cultural elite were enthralled by eugenics. Eugenics was the brainchild of Charles Darwin’s cousin Francis Galton and was developed in response to Darwin’s theory of natural selection. Rather than leave the future of the human race to chance, advocates of eugenics aimed to replace natural selection with a planned and deliberate selection. Genetic planning was seen as a no-brainer, as natural and important to future societies as town planning.11
Eugenics was seen as progressive and scientific, the natural outcome of Darwinism. To ensure the future of the human race, it was argued, certain types of people ought to be prevented from breeding. They would pollute the gene pool. The leading lights of the secular left lined up to support this bright new idea. It rapidly became the politically correct thing to think for British Socialists of the 1920s and 1930s.
H.G. Wells was convinced that humankind would drift to extinction unless the cultural elite took control of the evolutionary process. Wells believed that Lenin’s revolution in Russia represented an important step in that direction. He arranged to meet Lenin in 1920 and found him to be ‘a good type of scientific man’. Wells was aware that the new Soviet Union seemed to be killing rather large numbers of people. But Wells believed this was the price of fashioning a new humanity. To secure the future, you had to eliminate undesirables.12 The rest of the world had a lot to learn from Lenin, he told his trusting readers. And some of them believed him.
Membership in the Eugenics Society peaked during the 1930s. George Bernard Shaw declared that ‘the selective breeding of man’ was essential for the future of society. H.G. Wells was even more emphatic and enthusiastic. Eugenics would lead to the removal ‘of detrimental types and characteristics’ and the ‘fostering of desirable types’ in their place. It was only when Adolf Hitler championed eugenics that Western progressive thinkers began to realise that something had gone terribly wrong. But by then, it was too late.
Lewis was one of the most effective critics of H.G. Wells in the 1930s and 1940s. His three science-fiction novels each represent critiques of Wells’s approach. For Lewis, eugenics was simply inhuman. The movement might seem to be bright and progressive, given credibility by being grounded in science. Yet the way it was promoted was an example of ‘chronological snobbery’. It was assumed that its scientific credentials and novelty were enough to justify it. Today, almost nobody takes it seriously. It is widely regarded as repressive. Yet it was openly advocated by the secular left in the 1930s as one of the best hopes for the future of the human race. Lewis’s words of caution clearly need to be taken seriously. New ideas can be supremely bad ideas – and by the time people realise just how bad they are, it’s sometimes difficult to get rid of them.
But there’s another point that Lewis wants to make. When we read an older book – say, a treatise on science dating from the sixteenth century – we often feel patronising about its ideas. ‘That’s what they thought back then! But who would think that today? We’ve moved on.’ Our own ideas, we believe, are so much better.
Lewis asks us to realise that we have fallen into a trap. We’re assuming that our own ideas are right. What we need to appreciate is that every age assumes its ideas are right. Lewis suggests that we imagine how future readers – say, a century from now – will look back at some of the settled assumptions of our age. They might well think about our ideas what we think about older ideas today.
Do you see what Lewis is doing? He is using our critical attitude towards the past to anticipate the judgement that the future will make about us! We can’t just assume that the most recent is the best. We need to realise that posterity will discard much of what we value, but will retain some of it as having permanent value. What Lewis wants us to do is to identify what is junk and what is valuable.
Yet Lewis does more than call into question the idea that the most recent is the best. He challenges the idea that we ourselves know best. It’s one of the most natural assumptions that we can make: ‘This is how we see it – and this is how it is.’ Lewis invites us to see things through other eyes and expand our vision of reality as a result.
Let’s get Lewis to develop this point. What does he mean by expanding our vision?
An Expansion of Our Vision
Lewis thinks of education as an ‘enlargement of our vision’ or an ‘expansion of our minds’. The basic idea is found in many classical writers, who see education as a way of rescuing us from our own limitations. We know how we ourselves see things. But is this the best way? And how do we discover alternatives?
Lewis offers a brilliant answer, which maintains our individuality while at the same time opening us up to deeper and richer ways of seeing things. Literature offers us a different way of seeing things. The reading of literature opens our eyes, offering us new perspectives on things that we can evaluate and adopt.
My own eyes are not enough for me, I will see through those of others . . . In reading great literature, I become a thousand men and yet remain myself. Like the night sky in the Greek poem, I see with a myriad eyes, but it is still I who see.13
Reading literature, Lewis suggests, enables us ‘to see with other eyes, to imagine with other imaginations, to feel with other hearts, as well as our own’.14
Reading works of literature is about ‘entering fully into the opinions, and therefore also the attitudes, feelings, and total experience’ of other people.15 To read literature is thus to open us up to new ideas, or to force us to revisit those we once believed we were right to reject.
Lewis isn’t necessarily asking us to give up on our own ideas. In many ways, he is inviting us to go further and deeper. Sometimes we are right to reject ideas. But we need to be able to understand why we do so. After all, we may well encounter someone who holds those ideas. Our engagement will be much more satisfactory and positive if we understand where those ideas come from and have thought through responses to them.
Yet at other times, reading literature helps us to realise we have failed to appreciate the power of certain ideas, or their ability to make sense of things. For Lewis, learning at its best is about ‘trying on’ ways of looking at the world and seeing how well they work. Lewis’s own conversion to Christianity took place partly for this reason. When reading Christian literature, Lewis came to realise that there was something special, something realistic and true, about its representation of things that contrasted favourably with secular alternatives. Lewis came to see reading Christian literature as one of the things that brought him back to faith: ‘A young man who wishes to remain a sound Atheist cannot be too careful of his reading. There are traps everywhere.’16
As Lewis makes clear in Surprised by Joy, Christian writers such as George Herbert and John Donne helped him realise that their way of seeing things worked remarkably well. Might this, he wondered, be because they were right? It was an uncomfortable thought for Lewis, who at that time was still clinging to his increasingly fragile atheist faith.
Yet for Lewis, education is about more than being familiar with other ways of thinking or looking at things. It is about inhabiting them – in other words, experiencing the way of thinking and living that they make possible. Lewis uses a nice analogy to help us understand the point he is making – English tourists, so vividly and amusingly portrayed in E.M. Forster’s novel A Room with a View (1908). Some tourists, Lewis argues, visit foreign countries without any intention of being challenged by them. They bring their own tea with them so that they don’t have to drink the local alternative. They keep themselves at a distance from the local culture and see their ‘Englishness’ as something to be preserved at all costs.17 And when they return home, they are untainted by their experience.
For Lewis, real tourists are those who are prepared to learn from their experience abroad. They eat the local food and drink the local wine, seeing ‘the foreign country as it looks, not to the tourist, but to its inhabitants’. As a result, Lewis argues, these English tourists come home ‘modified, thinking and feeling’ in different ways. Their travel has enlarged their vision of things.
Education is about changing us – helping us realise that we are not always right and that we can gain a deeper and better grasp of reality by experiencing the world the way others do. Although Lewis sees this as characteristic of good education as a whole, he also sees it as being important for the education of Christians, who need to go deeper and further into their faith. Let’s look at what he has in mind.
Going Deeper: Lewis on Learning and the Christian Life
Oxford dons can be cruel to one another. I love the way a college academic dismissed one of his colleagues: ‘On the surface, he’s profound, but deep down, he’s superficial.’ One of the major themes of Lewis’s approach to education is the need to go deeper and to enlarge our vision of reality. This general approach has particular relevance to Christianity. As I read Lewis in my early twenties, I realised how shallow my faith was. Something would have to be done about that. And, as it turned out, I found Lewis enormously helpful in deepening my grasp of my faith.
So how does Lewis apply his ideas about education to his own faith? How can learning help us in the Christian life? Let’s pick up on a phrase that Lewis coined in a letter of February 1952: ‘Deep Church’.18 Lewis used this phrase to mean an attitude of valuing and an act of reconnecting with the Christian tradition. Unlike liberalism and modernism, which Lewis regarded as late and unwelcome arrivals on the Christian scene, a basic consensual Christian orthodoxy has always existed and still has the potential to enrich – without stifling – church life today. Lewis’s severe criticisms of the intellectual pretensions of secular modernity and the spiritual emptiness of the ‘Christianity-and-water’ religion of professed liberals rested on his conviction that both were betrayals of something far more important and worthwhile – namely, ‘Deep Church’.
For Lewis, Christianity is at its best when it is rooted in the past and engaged with the present. In explaining what he meant by ‘Deep Church’, Lewis declared that it designated ‘the Christian religion as understood ubique et ab omnibus’ – a shortened form of a Latin tagline meaning ‘the faith believed everywhere and by everyone’ – in other words, a basic consensual orthodoxy. Lewis put it like this in 1944: we need a ‘standard of plain, central Christianity (“mere Christianity” as Baxter called it)’.19 This is not some ‘insipid’ minimalist conception of Christianity, reduced to its lowest common denominator. Rather, it is ‘something positive, self-consistent, and inexhaustible’. It is like a ‘great level viaduct’, channelling the life-giving water of faith down the ages towards us, so that it might refresh and resource us.
Lewis invites us to think of the Church’s history as a long conversation about how best to interpret the Bible and to express and appreciate the rich ideas it contains. We need to connect with that conversation from its beginnings if we are to understand its later forms. ‘If you join at eleven o’clock a conversation which began at eight you will often not see the real bearing of what is said.’20
So how are we to do this? Whom should we be reading? Lewis mentions a series of writers that he personally found helpful – such as the poets George Herbert and Thomas Traherne, and the theologians Augustine of Hippo and Thomas Aquinas.21 But these are not necessarily the writers that we should read. Lewis’s choices clearly reflect his personal interests (remember, he was a professional student of English literature). Who else might be helpful?
One obvious example for us is Lewis himself. One of the reasons why Lewis’s Mere Christianity has been so successful is that it represents a distillation of the kind of ‘deep’ Christianity that Lewis both admired and expressed. Mere Christianity could be said to capture the clean and refreshing ‘sea breeze of the centuries’ in a bottle, so that we can benefit from Lewis’s labours of reading without having to repeat them ourselves. Lewis’s Christian mind was shaped mainly by the solid classical heritage of Plato, Athanasius of Alexandria, Augustine of Hippo, Thomas Aquinas, Thomas à Kempis, George Herbert and Thomas Traherne, given added imaginative and apologetic spice from George MacDonald and G.K. Chesterton.
To read Lewis is to connect with the ‘great tradition’ of Christian thought, expressed in a winsome and palatable way. Lewis is like a gateway, making the riches of ‘Deep Church’ more accessible. In my own case, I found that reading some of Lewis’s more substantial works – such as his 1941 sermon ‘The Weight of Glory’ – made me want to read writers such as Augustine of Hippo and Dante, while at the same time preparing me for some of their ideas and approaches. I don’t want to demean Lewis in any way by this comparison, but he was like a tour guide, quickly pointing out notable landmarks and giving me thumbnail sketches of their significance. Lewis made me want to visit these landmarks on my own, and find out more. And when I visited them, I found that they both confirmed and exceeded what I found in Lewis’s introductions.
But there are others – writers who stand within the ‘great tradition’ of the Christian faith – who can enrich our own grasp of our faith and make us better Christians. As someone who specialises in the history of Christian thought, I have noticed that some of the best recent books draw on older writers, putting their wisdom and insight at the service of a new generation. As so many have found, the antidote to a stale faith can lie in drinking deeply from these refreshing and life-giving springs – including Lewis himself.
So what is the purpose of education? Lewis would point to the way that it breaks our focus on the present, enlarges our view of the world and encourages us to explore the depths of our faith. All of these together, while not guaranteed to make us discover and love the good and dismiss the bad, will help us as we seek to live godly lives. And they will also help us to hold on to the good in times of trouble, the subject of our next conversation with Lewis.