Jennifer L. King and Dr. O. Glade Hunsaker, English Department
“We make men without chests and expect of them virtue and enterprise. We laugh at honour and are shocked to find traitors in our midst” (C.S. Lewis, The Abolition of Man, p. 37).
In his The Abolition of Man, C.S. Lewis lays out the foundations of his philosophy on education. While many of Lewis’s writings on Christianity are well read and accepted by members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, his writings on education are not as often explored both in and out of the Church, probably because they are generally less accessible to the casual reader. Lewis’s ideas on education, like his ideas on Christianity, resonate well with the doctrine and teachings of the Church. Because Lewis explores true principles in his writings on education, the ideas he teaches are not only crucial for people involved in the field of education, but are important for every person to understand. In this report, I will summarize some of the central ideas of Lewis’s educational philosophy. I will also give a brief accounting of the course of this study in the last year and a projection of my plans with it.
Lewis’s most central belief regarding education was in the Tao, or objective truth. In The Abolition of Man, Lewis gives numerous accounts of various cultures throughout time who have all had a belief in objective truth. It is only recently, Lewis says, that man has begun to think otherwise. The educator who believes in the Tao, Lewis says, has the duty to “train in the pupil those responses which are in themselves appropriate” (p. 32). By doing this, Lewis says, when the student comes to “the age for reflective thought,” he will “easily find the first principles in Ethics” (p. 29).
Not only does Lewis emphasize the importance of taking these positive strides toward instilling just sentiments in students, but he also criticizes teaching philosophies which take the negative tack of debunking sentimentalism. Lewis says, “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” (p. 27).
Lewis holds that the encouragement of just sentiments in students helps develop in them a “chest” which, he says, is emotions trained into just, true, and stable sentiments. He says that the intellect (which is spirit) rules the appetite (which is animal) through the chest. Thus educators who reject the Tao and debunk sentimentalism help produce what Lewis calls “men without chests.” Men without chests, Lewis says, do not have any reasonable system of values. Lewis shows the infeasibility of other supposedly Tao-less value systems, then shows the gravity of this situation by explaining what society will, in his view, become if the Tao is ignored.
For this study I have worked primarily with my mentor and former professor Dr. David L. Ward of the Ricks College English Department. We have together worked through, gained insight into, and recorded notes about much of Lewis’s writing on education. Our current plan (our vision of the project has shifted several times as we have come to more carefully discern the needs in this area of study) is to develop a reader’s companion in aphoristic form which will dig into and lay out ideas of Lewis from his The Abolition of Man, drawing upon other essays he has written to highlight certain education-related topics. Our goal is to encourage people to study The Abolition of Man by familiarizing them with the language and ideas of the book and to offer them greater insight into the book by providing them with quotations from and references to other texts.
All references are to C.S. Lewis’s The Abolition of Man, New York: Touchstone, 1996.