In the final book of the Ransom trilogy, That Hideous Strength (Scribner, 1945), C.S. Lewis presents his readers with a stark contrast between two communities: the residents of St. Anne’s on the Hill and the conspirators of the N.I.C.E. in Belbury. In doing so, Lewis offers two pictures of humanity. One is characterized by relationship, nature, and beauty, while the other is marked by bureaucracy, cold rationality, and deception. 

To explore these contrasting visions, Lewis follows Mark and Jane, a married couple, in their individual journeys for meaning, belonging, and ultimately, redemption. Mark is a trained sociologist and fellow at the fictitious Bracton College. Despite his marriage to Jane and successful academic career, Mark is lonely and unfulfilled. In the opening pages, he takes immense pleasure in simply being included in a clique. Meanwhile, Jane, an academic herself, regrets the toll her marriage has taken on her academic career, and the current state of her and Mark’s relationship. She is bitter, hopeless, and discontent with the cards life has dealt her. 

In this article, I want to briefly sketch out some pivotal moments in the novel and then offer some insights for educators today. For while this story’s plot is thick enough to stand on its own, Lewis shares in the preface that there is more to the story, so to speak. He writes, “This is a ‘tall story’ about devilry, though it it has behind it a serious ‘point’ which I have tried to make in my Abolition of Man” (7). Let us proceed with seeking to uncover this “point” to see what Lewis what might teach us.

Surprised by Joy

Early in the novel, Mark is brought into an exclusive group of the college, the Progressive Element, and eventually invited to join the National Institute of Co-ordinated Experiments (N.I.C.E.) itself. Through this process, his desire for belonging is quenched, though never fully, as he makes his way further and further into the inner circle. Still, it is a painful process. Despite repeated attempts to understand his job description and the reporting structure of the institution, his requests are constantly pushed aside. The deputy director John Wither is evasive and dismissive, despite regularly referring to the N.I.C.E. as a family. 

Meanwhile, Jane finds herself being drawn to a very different kind of community. Despite the men and women at St. Anne’s on the Hill referring to themselves as a “company” and “army,” they live together in a beautiful and spacious manor, fulfilling the vision of family that the N.I.C.E. allegedly claimed to be. In her first visit to the manor at St. Anne’s, she walks through a beautiful garden, teeming with life and beauty. Later, she meets with the director of the community, Dr. Ransom, and leaves overflowing with joy (149). 

Interestingly, the source of her joy when meeting with Dr. Ransom was not the conversation they shared together, but the transcendent experience of encountering his divine and royal aura. For the first time, her soul had touched the heavens, as it were, awakening in her a desire for beauty that had grown dormant over the course of her life. Suddenly she gained new eyes for the beauty of nature, from rays of sunlight to grazing wildlife. She longed to hear the chorales of Bach again and read the sonnets of Shakespeare afresh. She cherished the speech of her cabinmates in the train and rejoiced in her hunger and thirst for buttered toast and tea. Her conversion had begun.

Isolation and Objectivity

In contrast, Mark’s progress through concentric circles of exclusivity in Belbury finally leads to his own isolation as he sits alone in a cell awaiting his training in “objectivity.” Professor Augustus Frost, a leader in the innermost circle of the N.I.C.E., shares with Mark his vision for humanity as a race of pure mind and liberated of emotional preference. He desires to destroy all human instincts for what is right, noble, and beautiful. Interestingly, Mark’s training takes place in a room of disproportion with a ceiling covered in specks at irregular intervals. On the walls of the room are pictures, many of them with scriptural themes, yet each of them distorted through bizarre elements of horror and strangeness. Professor Frost’s goal is clear: destroy all of Mark’s intuitions for what is natural, normal, and right. 

To Frost’s surprise, however, the room soon began to have the reverse effect. The striking abnormality and ugliness of the room engendered in Mark a longing for the straight, whole, and normal. The narrator Lewis writes, “As the desert first teaches men to love water, or as absence first reveals affection, there rose up against this background of the sour and crooked some kind of vision of the sweet and the straight. Something else–something he vaguely called the ‘Normal’–apparently existed” (296). In the end, Mark finds himself choosing a side, aligning himself with the mountainous pull towards the moral universe, and rejecting Professor Frost’s vision for objectivity untethered from objective value.

And yet, the ultimate test was yet to come. For, in a pivotal moment of the training in the objective room, Professor Frost, with demonic calculation, instructs Mark to trample on a full-sized crucifix and insult it. Unlike the moral defense against the other exercises that had risen inside of Mark, this was different. There was nothing about the wooden figure nailed to the cross that was inherently straight and normal. Though Mark is not a Christian, his conversation was already underway, and he realizes that the crucifix is…”what happened when the Straight met the Crooked, a picture of what the Crooked did to the Straight–what it would do to him if he remained straight. It was, in a more emphatic sense than he had yet understood, a cross” (333). In this decisive moment, this test of tests, Mark refused to desecrate the image.

Hope for Redemption

In the end, both characters encounter elements of redemption, not only for their marriage, but for their moral and spiritual salvation.

Jane’s struggle with pride, most visibly manifested in the novel through her repudiation of traditional gender norms, is overcome as she realizes the goodness of being a creature under the authority and care of God. And yet the divine goodness she accepts comes at a high price: control. She must give up herself to another, to God himself, and let him mold her as he sees fit (316). The universe now appears to her much larger than she imagined. It is massive, stormy, beautiful, and unbending, existing independently of any human emotion or idea. She must embrace the truth that this reality is greater than herself by recognizing she is a creature of God.

Mark’s conversion is different. Though he exhibits the moral courage to resist Professor Frost’s training in objectivity, he has not had the benefit of being formed by the community at St. Anne’s. Only in the end does he begin to recognize his own shortcomings as a husband and lover. His fear is that it is too late, that what would be best for Jane at this point is to move on. But then, in the last available moment, love strikes him as only the goddess Venus can, and his soul is saved.

Insights for Schools Today

There are so many layers to this story, from the redemption of Mark and Jane to the heavenly presence of Dr. Ransom to the demonic nature of the N.I.C.E. It truly is a battle for the abolition of humanity.

In The Abolition of Man (Harper Collins, 1971), Lewis warns against a dystopian future in which humanity abandons traditional moral values in the name of scientific progress. Though he is clear that his argument is not against science itself, in his context he can see that the many successes of modern science have created a lure to conquer nature completely. In the end, all that will be left is to conquer human nature. He writes, “Human nature will be the last part of Nature to surrender to Man. The battle will then be won” (59).

Inspired by That Hideous Strength and The Abolition of Man, I will conclude this article by offering three suggestions for schools in order to resist the coming abolition.

1. Create communities of joy and hospitality.

One of the most endearing elements of the story is the community of St. Anne’s. While I did not focus on the themes of comradeship and belonging so much in this article, it is well worth study and imitation. It can be easy to think that the abolition of man is ultimately a philosophical debate and therefore will take place at an intellectual level. But the reality is that strongest way we can retain our humanity and moral values is through creating beautiful spaces of belonging for learning to occur. From filling our schools with beautiful art and nature to building time for deep relationships to thrive, our schools can become their own manifestations of the idyllic St. Anne’s community.

2. Champion the reality of objective moral values.

Certainly Lewis’ greatest warning in The Abolition of Man, manifested in the N.I.C.E. at Belbury in That Hideous Strength, is the rejection of traditional moral values, what Lewis calls the Tao (pronounced “Dao”). As Alasdair MacIntyre addresses at great length in After Virtue, the modern West has traded out objective moral belief for mere emotional preferences. Ideas of virtue and duty have been reduced to mere subjective responses that cannot be used for moral evaluation. In this framework, a solder sacrificing his life to save his squadron is a story that can engender emotions of high praise, but it is not representative of a deeper truth that we are morally obligated to imitate.

But as Lewis argues through different means in both books, moral truth, goodness, and beauty does exist independently of human perception. In their own journeys, Mark and Jane encountered what Lewis described as a mountain–an entity that existed apart from themselves that is firm, immovable, and embedded in the universe itself. This is natural law, or what Mark experienced as the Straight and Normal.

Our schools need to cling to and proclaim the reality of objective goodness, truth, and beauty, for the future of humanity is at stake.

3. Connect the study of science to worship of our Creator.

There is a warning in both books regarding the dangers that emerge when modern science, or any discipline for that matter, is untethered from moral and biblical truth. In the case of Belbury, the scientific activity literally became demonic. While it is important to equip our students with understanding of the scientific method, steps for conducting a successful lab experiment, and other elements of modern science, we should regularly connect our study of creation to worship of our Creator. For scripture commands us to subdue and cultivate creation, not conquer it out of human arrogance and pride.

It is this temptation toward human arrogance and pride that is the “hideous strength” of which Lewis warns. As the inhabitants of Shinar sought to make a name for themselves through erecting a great tower at Babel, so the temptation to be our own gods resided in Mark and Jane, as well as in us today.

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C.S. Lewis, The Abolition of Man

I begin with a book that rivals in many ways the essay by Dorothy Sayers that got our educational renewal movement started. In fact, C. S. Lewis delivered these lectures (the Riddell Memorial Lectures were a series given over three nights at King’s College, Newcastle University on 24–26 February 1943) a good four years before Sayers (her paper was read at the Vacation Course in Education at Oxford University in the Summer of 1947). If you have read “The Lost Tools of Learning,” then you are well prepared to tackle these essays.

In three essays, Lewis mounts a defense of objective value in the face of moral subjectivism. He predicted the dystopian future we now live in where tolerance is the reigning virtue, despite the fact that we are not a very tolerant people, at least one wouldn’t think so when one reads comments on social media. This book provides a foundational rationale for the “classical” part of our movement. (This book pairs nicely with Mere Christianity, connecting the “Christian” part of our movement.) And yet it nicely goes beyond what we might consider a fixation on Western civilization as the sole or sufficient basis for a liberal arts education. We see this most prominently in his use of the Tao as representative of objective values based on natural law. What he is getting at transcends an East/West divide and demonstrates that values are meta-cultural.

Sample Quote: “This things which I have called for convenience the Tao, and which others may call Natural Law or Traditional Morality or the First Principles of Practical Reason or the First Platitudes, is not one among a series of possible systems of value. It is the sole source of all value judgements. If it is rejected, all value is rejected. If any value is retained, it is retained. The effort to refute it and raise a new system of value in its place is self-contradictory. There has never been, and never will be, a radically new judgement of value in the history of the world. What purport to be new systems or (as they now call them) ‘ideologies’, all consist of fragments from the Tao itself, arbitrarily wrenched from their context in the whole and then swollen to madness in their isolation, yet still owing to the Tao and to it alone such validity as they possess. . . . The rebellion of new ideologies against the Tao is a rebellion of the branches against the tree: if the rebels could succeed they would find that they had destroyed themselves. The human mind has no more power of inventing a new value than of imagining a new primary colour, or, indeed of creating a new sun and a new sky for it to move in.”

C. S. Lewis, The Abolition of Man (Harper, 2000): 43-44.

I could see this book being valuable if you are a teacher or administrator. It is also well worth adopting in an upper-level humanities course.

If you would like an opportunity to delve deeply into this book, there is an upcoming event you might consider joining if you are located in the American mid-west. The Alcuin Fellowship will be meeting on March 30-April 1 at Clapham School in Wheaton. We’ll be reading The Abolition of Man and having rich discussion around the book in small groups. There are limited spaces available. You can register for this fellowship at https://www.alcuinfellowship.com/midwestern-alcuin-retreat-2023/.

Jonathan T. Pennington, Jesus the Great Philosopher

Okay, so I reviewed this book in two posts back in the autumn of 2021. Jonathan is a good friend, and this is a good book. I keep returning to it because it offers such a compelling synthesis of Christianity with the liberal arts tradition. The wisdom of this book abounds, and we benefit repeatedly from the insights of a leading New Testament scholar. Yet, Pennington also puts the cookies on the bottom shelf, so to speak.

This book goes well with the previous selection, although it offers a more modern mix of metaphors and imagery. There’s a brilliance in being able to bring such individuals as Aristotle and Steve Martin together as Pennington does. I think you’ll find this is a volume that can speak to teacher and student alike.

Sample Quote: “Hence, as we have seen throughout this book, there is insight to be gained from what the philosophers said about all sorts of topics. We needn’t cut ourselves completely off from their wisdom. Rather, we can gather lumber from whatever trees are available as we build the Christ-shaped temple of our lives, with Holy Scripture as the building inspector. As Justin himself said, “Whatever things were rightly said among all men, are the property of us Christians. . . . For all the writers [ancient philosophers and poets] were able to see realities darkly through the sowing of the implanted word that was in them. For the seed and imitation that is imparted according to capacity is one thing, and quite another is the things itself, of which there is the participation and imitation according to the grace which is from Him.”

That last part gets a bit complex, but the point is straightforward – any wisdom in the world is from God, who created all, but we Christians have the grace that enables complete understanding. This includes the grandest human philosophical question: What does it mean to live a whole, meaningful, and flourishing life? What is the wisdom we need for the Good Life?”

Jonathan T. Pennington, Jesus the Great Philosopher (Brazos, 2020): 203.

Barbara Oakley, A Mind for Numbers

My next selection moves away from the humanities and provides something for those STEM teachers among us. Having taught Geometry for several years, I have appreciated how Barbara Oakley spells out effective learning strategies for students. I myself was never a great math student, and diving into teaching math well over a decade ago required going back to the basics. Along the way I found that math itself is not particularly difficult, but it can be quite different than the kinds of learning that goes on in the humanities side of the curriculum.

Oakley bases her work in solid neurological studies. One of the key insights in her book is to “chunk” mathematical and scientific concepts. A chunk is a conceptual piece of information that is “bound together through meaning.” (54) That “meaning” bit is significant because there’s a sense of the personal importance. The chunk attracts information or ideas to it, providing for mental leaps as separate units of information bind together through neural networks.

She provides three steps to forming a chunk. First, you focus your attention on the information to be chunked. (57) She advises learning in a low-distraction environment, free from screens. One of the core concepts here is that old neural networks enable you to form new neural pathways. In other words, we build from the known to the unknown. In essence, we want to create these chunks off of ideas, concepts or information that we already know well.

Second, you need to understand the basic idea (58). She differentiates the initial moment of understanding – the “aha!” moment – from the kind of understanding where you can close the book and test yourself on the problem. This is very much the way narration works. Being able to bring forward the formula, the steps, or the process in mathematics demonstrates that the idea is understood.

Third, you need to connect the basic idea to a context (58-59). In other words, a student needs to know when, say, apply the Pythagorean theorem, and when not to. She likens the chunk to a tool, “If you don’t know when to use that tool, it’s not going to do you a lot of good.” (59)

Chunking is not only valuable in mathematics, but across the curriculum. You can chunk historical concepts or literary terms. Chunking can be a pathway toward integration as we allow that chunk to attract more and more concepts to it. I think this is similar to Charlotte Mason’s expression about ideas, “Ideas behave like living creatures––they feed, grow, and multiply.” (Charlotte Mason, Parents and Children, 77)

Sample Quote: “A synthesis – an abstraction, chunk, or gist idea – is a neural pattern. Good chunks form neural patterns that resonate, not only within the subject we’re working in, but with other subjects and areas of our lives. The abstraction helps you transfer ideas from one area to another. That’s why great art, poetry, music, and literature can be so compelling. When we grasp the chunk, it takes on a new life in our own minds – we form ideas that enhance and enlighten the neural patters we already possess, allowing us to more readily see and develop other related patterns.”

Barbara Oakley, A Mind for Numbers (Tarcher Perigee, 2014): 197.

What I like about this book is that her strategies are not simply about how to test better to get good scores on tests or entrance into college, etc. Instead, she sees how this can be a pathway to deep meaning in life through acquired skill, and how an individual can achieve creativity in multiple domains of knowledge through accumulated competence. The quote comes from a section entitled “Deep Chunking,” which segues nicely to our next book.

Cal Newport, Deep Work

Associate professor of computer science at Georgetown, Cal Newport not only delivered a best-selling book, but coined a phrase that has become part of the cultural parlance: “deep work.” In many respects, this is a counterpoint to Nicholas Carr’s The Shallows inasmuch as Newport accepts the premise that the internet has made us shallow and then goes on to propose a solution by going deep through focused attention. The book is designed in an interesting way. Newport begins by spelling out three ideas that get at the “why” of deep work. Then the second part of the book spells out the “how.” Here I want to focus on the first part.

Newport’s first two ideas interact with the new economy centered around knowledge work: deep work is valuable largely because it is rare. This points to a “market mismatch” where talented individuals who are able to produce knowledge that is deep. His third idea is that deep work is meaningful. This is an idea that riffs on the metaphorical meaning of the word “deep.” When our work connects to something of the human experience, there’s a depth of character that has intrinsic value. I like how Newport develops the concept of craftsmanship as a sacred practice.

Sample Quote: “Once understood, we can connect this sacredness inherent in traditional craftsmanship to the world of knowledge work. To do so, there are two key observations we must first make. The first might be obvious but requires emphasis: There’s nothing intrinsic about the manual trades when it comes to generating this particular source of meaning. Any pursuit – be it physical or cognitive – that supports high levels of skill can also generate a sense of sacredness.”

Cal Newport, Deep Work (Grand Central, 2016): 88-89.

As our skill increases, our sense of the meaning we are generating also increases. One gets plugged into the creative impulse that is part of our own imago Dei createdness. Now this is a point that is likely remote from Newport’s thinking, but his use of the word “sacred” points in this direction. Newport goes on to explain his second key observation that to access this deep meaning, we must embrace deep work as the portal to cultivating our skill.

One of the reasons why I recommend this book is that it has provided a framework for understanding how our educational renewal movement – perhaps counterintuitively – gives our students a strategic advantage as they enter the new economy. By encountering the deep ideas of the great works our students get connected to a level of depth not present in the school system. Many of our schools feature intense instruction on writing and rhetoric, which is essential to the knowledge work Newport describes as so rare and valuable. Graduates from classical schools are well trained to do deep work. So, by reading this you can cultivate the habit of deep work in yourself and your students.

Gerald Graff and Cathy Birkenstein, They Say / I Say

My final selection is a textbook ostensibly for college writing. This year I adopted this title for our junior rhetoric class. It is full of practical advice for writers learning how to build effective arguments in academic writing. We are using the fifth edition, which came out in 2021, but any of the editions that have come out since the original 2006 edition features most of the same contours.

The central idea of the book is that effective argumentation begins with a good understanding of what others have said before venturing into an expression of one’s own beliefs. They posit that “working with the ‘they say / I say” model can also help with invention, finding something to say. In our experience, students best discover what they want to say not by thinking about a subject in an isolation booth but by reading texts, listening closely to what other writers say, and looking for an opening through which they can enter the conversation.” (xviii). As classical educators, we are very aware that the great books tradition is all about the great conversation. How better to take advantage of the plethora of books we read than by utilizing that conversation to initiate new pathways for our students to explore based on the “they say / I say” model.

Another feature of this book is how it utilizes templates. The authors recognize the liability of training students to use templates. “At first, many of our students complain that using templates will take away their originality and creativity and make them all sound the same.” (13) But through practice and instruction, students begin to see how there is a basic structure to how good argumentation works. Even after initial exposure to these templates, we can analyze academic writing to identify not only the basic “they say / I say” structure, but also finer points of perspective, argumentation, and analysis. For students raised on the 10-sentence paragraph and the five-paragraph essay, this approach to templates builds on earlier types of templates.

Students are able to practice utilizing two major questions as they work through this book. There is the establishment of relief (using an idea from sculpture), between what you are proposing and what others might say. Students begin to become sensitive to the question, “Oh yeah, who says otherwise?” The other question that students learn to become aware of is the “so what?” or “what difference does this make?” set of questions. For students in junior rhetoric, this is excellent training for the work they will accomplish the following year during senior thesis. The essential skills students learn in this book are critical analysis of sources, summary of conventional viewpoints, handling controversial topics, and expressing the application and consequences of one’s point.

One chapter I really appreciate is the chapter on revision. For many students, revision amounts to identifying typographical errors and eliminating the teacher’s red marks. Well, the approach taken by the authors provides a handy guide to how to make substantial revisions to an essay.

Sample Quote: “One of the most common frustrations teachers have – we’ve had it, too – is that students do not revise in any substantial way. As one of our colleagues put it, “I ask my classes to do a substantial revision of an essay they’ve turned in, emphasis on the word ‘substantial,’ but invariably little is changed in what I get back. Students hand in the original essay with a word changed here and there, a few spelling errors corrected, and a comma or two added. . . . I feel like all my advice is for nothing.” We suspect, however, that in most cases when students do merely superficial revisions, it’s not because they are indifferent or lazy, as some teachers may assume, but because they aren’t sure what a good revision looks like. Like even many seasoned writers, these students would like to revise more thoroughly, but when they reread what they’ve written, they have trouble seeing where it can be improved – and how. What they lack is not just a reliable picture in their head of what their draft could be but also reliable strategies for getting there.”

Gerald Graff & Cathy Birkenstein, They Say / I Say (Norton, 2021): 149.

After this introduction, which describes what many a teacher has felt, the authors provide guidance on how to make substantial revisions to an essay. The chapter on revision concludes with an excellent revision checklist. Students regularly run into the same frustrations we have with revision. They have a sense that they could express their thoughts in a better, more sophisticated way, but they are unpracticed in how to excavate their own writing with a view to finding the veins of gold, let alone finding the weaknesses to correct.

Conclusion

Hopefully this list of books to read in 2023 will inspire you to dig into some different areas where you can become a more inspired and skilled educator this year. There are tons of other books I could have recommended, and you likely have some of your own that are top of your list.

Even more essential than reading the selection of book listed here is building the habit of daily reading. Even a little bit on a daily basis begins to accumulate to a significant amount of input into your life. With lesson planning, grading, meetings and family life, it can be difficult to carve out time to read. Steven Covey talks about how important it is to “sharpen the saw.” For us educators, reading is one of the best ways for us to cultivate the joy of learning we want to inspire in our students. So whether it’s these books or others that spark interest in you, take a moment even now to read.

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In The Liberal Arts Tradition: A Philosophy of Christian Classical Education (Version 2.0, Revised Edition), Kevin Clark and Ravi Jain argue for a recovery of the tradition of moral philosophy against the reductionism of the modern social sciences. Their account of the intellectual history that led to the replacement of this classical and Christian paradigm for wisdom in ethics and the humanities, broadly considered, faithfully unpacks the faulty assumptions of this shaky modern and postmodern problem. In this series on replacing Bloom’s taxonomy with Aristotle’s Intellectual Virtues, we have already had occasion to bring the razor edge of their intellectual knife to bear upon Bloom’s taxonomy itself. After all, Bloom’s taxonomy majors on a false analogy from the natural sciences (i.e. a taxonomy for ordering biological species) for the emerging social science of modern education, now obsessed with measurement, clear objectives, and abstract knowledge. 

But as stunning as Clark and Jain’s tour de force is from a broad, intellectual perspective, it leaves us with something missing that only a full recovery of Aristotle’s intellectual virtue of prudence can help us grasp. In order to understand this missing link, we will need to explain more completely Aristotle’s distinctions between prudence or practical wisdom (phronesis) and not only philosophic wisdom (sophia), but also their forerunners, scientific knowledge (episteme) and intuition (nous), as well as the moral virtues, with which prudence is inextricably linked. This set of distinctions will help us recognize more clearly the nature of this lost goal of education, the student’s prudence to decide and act reasonably with regard to human goods. 

(Read the first article in this series: The Counsels of the Wise, Part 1: Foundations of Christian Prudence.)

The key to Aristotle’s distinctions can be found in kernel form in a passage of C.S. Lewis’ Abolition of Man, which we have already cited. In defending the moral law against modernist skepticism, he claimed, “I had sooner play cards against a man who was quite sceptical about ethics, but bred to believe that ‘a gentleman does not cheat’, than against an irreproachable moral philosopher who had been brought up among sharpers” (24). Lewis’s point is that the character of a person is influenced by his upbringing and habits, more than his skill or intellectual attainments in philosophical speculation. Such a consideration raises the question of whether we are merely aiming at creating clever devils, or if we intend to educate students for genuine moral virtue and wisdom. In fact, in claiming that there is a type of wisdom, a moral philosophy even, which does not require the moral virtue of the philosopher, Lewis is underlining a crucial set of distinctions found in Aristotle.

Different Intellectual Virtues Have Different Ends

Aristotle began his Nicomachean Ethics by noting that different arts and sciences have different sorts of goals: “Now, as there are many actions, arts, and sciences, their ends also are many; the end of the medical art is health, that of shipbuilding a vessel, that of strategy victory, that of economics wealth” (Book I, 1; Revised Oxford Trans., p. 1729; 1094a1ff.). The intellectual virtues contribute in different ways to the ultimate goal of happiness, Aristotle’s eudaimonia or human flourishing. These goals are not ancillary to the nature of the intellectual virtues themselves, but are part and parcel of their nature. It is because of this that we not only can but must distinguish between moral philosophy or science and practical wisdom or prudence, even though these seem to have the same subject matter. 

Perhaps Aristotle’s most helpful example of this set of distinctions occurs when he is discussing the difference between artistry and science. Using an example where the subject matter seems to overlap, he contrasts the perspective of the carpenter and the geometer:

For a carpenter and a geometer look for right angles in different ways; the former does so in so far as the right angle is useful for his work, while the latter inquires what it is or what sort of thing it is; for he is a spectator of the truth. We must act in the same way, then, in all other matters as well, that our main task may not be subordinated to minor questions. Nor must we demand the cause in all matters alike; it is enough in some cases that the fact be well established, as in the case of the first principles; the fact is a primary thing or first principle. Now of the first principles we see some by induction, some by perception, some by a certain habituation, and others too in other ways. But each set of principles we must try to investigate in the natural way, and we must take pains to determine them correctly, since they have a great influence on what follows. For the beginning is thought to be more than half of the whole, and many of the questions we ask are cleared up by it.

I, 7; R. Oxford, p. 1736; 1098a29 – 1098b8

The first part of this paragraph is clear enough; a carpenter doesn’t bother with the speculative complexities of angles and their essence like a geometer does. All he needs is a good-enough right angle to be getting on with. In fact, if he paused and contemplated the angle’s essence and relationships too long, he would cease acting as a carpenter. 

What is perhaps harder to see is how Aristotle’s train of thought applies this idea to his own treatise on ethics. We might expect him to side with the geometer, but instead he is claiming to avoid the “minor questions”of moral philosophy or speculative science that might distract him from the “main task.” What is his main task, we might ask? To instruct human beings in making decisions regarding what is good for them (i.e. to teach prudence), we must conclude. He needs a good-enough right angle, which any practiced carpenter can perceive just fine; right angles are one of those “facts” or “first principles,” with which a carpenter must work all the time in his craft. When we get these straight, the battle is more than half-won. 

In artistry or craftsmanship, these principles are perceived, reasoned at by induction, or habituated. The same is true of philosophic wisdom, where intuition (the Greek nous) must perceive first principles correctly, while scientific knowledge (episteme) demonstrates universal truths. Prudence or practical wisdom (phronesis) likewise has its forerunners; in fact, when Aristotle mentions “habituation” he most likely has in mind the habit-forming process as the necessary background for the intellectual virtue that deliberates well with regard to human goods. The moral virtues must link arms with the intellectual virtue of prudence for either to be complete.

As he explains, the prerequisite for understanding the subject matter of prudence is a proper moral upbringing:

Hence any one who is to listen intelligently to lectures about what is noble and just and, generally, about the subjects of political science must have been brought up in good habits. For the facts are the starting-point, and if they are sufficiently plain to him, he will not need the reason as well; and the man who has been well brought up has or can easily get starting-points. And as for him who neither has nor can get them, let him hear the words of Hesiod:

Far best is he who knows all things himself;

Good, he that hearkens when men counsel right;

But he who neither knows, nor lays to heart

Another’s wisdom, is a useless wight.

I, 4; R. Oxford, p. 1731; 1095b4ff.; quotation is from Works and Days 293-7.

A person cannot even “listen intelligently to lectures about what is noble and just” without some measure of moral excellence or “good habits,” according to Aristotle. It’s not that the situation for such a person is hopeless, but he must listen to and store up in his heart the counsels of the wise if he is to remedy the faults of his uninstructed conscience.

So far so good, as we have already mentioned the link between the moral virtues and prudence. But the presence of Lewis’s imaginary “moral philosopher who had been brought up among sharpers” seems to put the lie to Aristotle’s claim that good habits are a prerequisite… unless we consider the possibility that our modern moral philosopher is not a prudent man at all, but simply a scientist. He may reason accurately from accepted starting points or first principles in the tradition of inquiry for his discipline, but these do not originate from his personal convictions or familiarity with human goods through personal habituation. He is a professional, an academic, a peddler of abstract knowledge.

This then is the danger of missing Aristotle’s distinctions in intellectual virtues, because they are distinctions in the goals or ends of education. The carpenter’s goal is to create something with the material he uses; right angles are part of the necessary means to his product. The geometer aims to demonstrate abstract truths about angles and their relationship. What then is the moral philosopher’s goal? Is it demonstration of abstract truth about human nature? Then he is a scientist and he may or may not be very wise in his own life. But the prudent person requires a different sort of intellectual precision, because he must deliberate and make practical choices about how to live his life, in the midst of all the particularities that he inhabits. Too precise a moral science may not, in fact, be very useful to him. 

As Aristotle explains,

Now fine and just actions, which political science investigates, exhibit much variety and fluctuation, so that they may be thought to exist only by convention and not by nature. And goods also exhibit a similar fluctuation because they bring harm to many people; for before now men have been undone by reason of their wealth, and others by reason of their courage. We must be content, then, in speaking of such subjects and with such premisses to indicate the truth roughly and in outline, and in speaking about things which are only for the most part true and with premisses of the same kind to reach conclusions that are no better. In the same spirit, therefore, should each of our statements be received; for it is the mark of an educated man to look for precision in each class of things just so far as the nature of the subject admits: it is evidently equally foolish to accept probable reasoning from a mathematician and to demand from a rhetorician demonstrative proofs.

Book I, 3; Revised Oxford, p. 1730; 1094a13ff.

In a way, Aristotle is going further than our claim to say that moral science may be a flawed endeavor in and of itself. This coheres with Clark and Jain’s critique of the modern move toward the social sciences rather than accepting the tradition of moral philosophy. For Aristotle’ prudence is the goal of moral philosophy: his is a practical philosophy for life.

Filling the Gap in PGMAPT

The gap in Kevin Clark and Ravi Jain’s The Liberal Arts Tradition comes from the fact that they trace an intellectual history of the shift in assumptions or first principles for the academic disciplines of the social sciences or moral philosophy. While important in its own right, this move neglects the goal of prudence as an intellectual virtue: the person’s actual well lived life. But one way of developing the Aristotelian distinctions would argue that even moral philosophy is a form of sophia, philosophic wisdom. And while Aristotle ultimately regards sophia as a higher intellectual virtue than phronesis, he does not thereby exclude phronesis as necessary for a happy life (book VI, ch. 13). 

For this reason, we propose an addition to Clark and Jain’s PGMAPT (Piety, Gymnastic, Music, liberal Arts, Philosophy and Theology) paradigm of the liberal arts tradition. Piety, Music and Gymnastic may help form the habituated moral sensibilities necessary for prudence, but none of them seem to constitute the intellectual virtue of prudence itself. The liberal arts (as well as the fine and common arts) are traditional paths of artistry, as we contended in our series on Apprenticeship in the Arts. Philosophy has been traditionally divided into wisdom about the natural world, human goods and affairs (or moral philosophy) and divine philosophy or metaphysics, but the traditional terms for intellectual virtue in these areas are either science or scientific knowledge (episteme), or its more finished attainment of wisdom (sophia), which assumes an accurate perception and understanding of first principles (intuition or nous). 

Aristotle’s terminology and distinctions bring to light the need for another category alongside the acquisition of the liberal arts at the heart of this paradigm: the intellectual virtue of practical wisdom or prudence (phronesis). Otherwise, we leave out the reasoned outcome of moral formation: the educated person’s intellectual capacity to deliberate about what is good for himself and for other human beings. Andrew Kern of the CiRCE Institute has discussed rhetoric as the master art to rule them all, defining it as the art of decision-making in community. This helpfully draws out part of the connection between the liberal arts and prudence; they are in fact interdependent. On the other hand, Kern’s move unhelpfully collapses Aristotle’s distinction between the intellectual virtues of prudence and artistry. One can be skilled in the liberal arts and imprudent; likewise, a person could be prudent but a poor communicator.

In actual fact, the proper goals of education must include prudence separately from the liberal arts, otherwise we will end up neglecting the beating heart of education, just like the modern educators that C.S. Lewis bemoaned. In our zeal for the traditions of the liberal arts of grammar, logic and rhetoric, or arithmetic, geometry, music and astronomy, we will neglect teaching students to reason effectively with regard to their own choices as individuals. At the school where I work we have a Latin saying that we often repeat at assembly, non scholae, sed vitae, not for school, but for life. The liberal arts, as I have argued elsewhere, are in fact also practical tools for the workaday world, in spite of our Aristotelian love of leisure and the contemplative life. But viewed in and of themselves and without the guiding heart of prudence, without practical reasoning in line with the traditional moral virtues, the liberal arts are hollow. They must have blood of real moral decision-making pumping through them, if the body of our education is to be more than a hollowed-out corpse. 

Another way of putting this might be to call for a third strand through the trunk of the tree of Clark and Jain’s PGMAPT paradigm. Instead of piety simply remaining in the grounding or roots of the tree, “governed by theology” up top, it should intertwine with the liberal arts in the form of prudential wisdom, as distinct from moral philosophy (nota bene: the trivium might more naturally find its culmination in metaphysics then). To be clear, I am not claiming that Clark and Jain have forgotten about or been unconcerned with matters concerning the development of prudence, only that without naming practical wisdom distinctly as an intellectual virtue, it does in fact tend to be neglected by teachers in a modern educational environment. 

Moral virtue has been and will continue to be a major concern of the classical education movement. The point of this series, however, is to see what light Aristotle’s specific and unique paradigm of five intellectual virtues sheds on the goals of education. Aristotle’s distinction between the moral virtues and the intellectual virtues, specifically the intellectual virtue of phronesis or practical wisdom calls for a recognition of prudence as a proper goal of education:

Excellence too is distinguished into kinds in accordance with this difference; for we say that some excellences are intellectual and others moral, philosophic wisdom and understanding and practical wisdom being intellectual, liberality and temperance moral. For in speaking about a man’s character we do not say that he is wise or has understanding but that he is good-tempered or temperate; yet we praise the wise man also with respect to his state; and of states we call those which merit praise excellences.

I, 13, p. 1742; 1103a4-10

Influenced as we are by Bloom’s taxonomy of objectives in the cognitive domain we tend to separate moral matters from so called academic ones; of course, simply by adopting a Christian frame of reference, we may go some way toward the practices that attempt to habituate piety and good morals in the young. Our teachers may also be less reticent in teaching various subjects to bring up aspects of goodness within a committed moral frame of reference. But this does not mean that students are actively instructed in moral reasoning in any substantive way through a standard course of study.

The liberal arts can be used in service of prudence or practical wisdom, but they can also be used in the service of episteme, scientific knowledge, or nous, intuition or understanding. They are formidable tools in this sense. But between Is and Ought, the reasoning of Fact and of Value, Truth and Goodness, there is a wall of separation. Just because something is so does not make it right. Modern skepticism about value judgments posits that “they are entirely subjective and relative to the individual who makes them,” Mortimer Adler points out in Six Great Ideas (68). Therefore, the modern academic bred on Bloom’s has been inclined to collapse all prescriptive statements into merely descriptive ones. Teachers trained in modern colleges and graduate schools have been trained in this sort of descriptive precision, and will therefore be unlikely to venture out into the prescriptive arena of moral reasoning in their teaching of literature, history, science and mathematics, unless practical wisdom is made a specific course goal of their instruction. 

How would we in fact instruct the consciences of our students for prudence throughout the K-12 sequence? This will be the subject of future articles. But before we close we can note a one promising idea for teaching prudence already present in the classical education movement. That is David Hicks’s conception of the Ideal Type in Norms and Nobility:

An Ideal Type tyrranized classical education. The ancient schoolmaster in his intense struggle to achieve a living synthesis of thought and action exemplified this Ideal and passed it on to his pupils by inviting them to share in his struggle for self-knowledge and self-mastery, the immature mind participating in the mature. Against this Ideal were the master’s achievements and his pupil’s judged. All fell short, of course, but some – and here’s the rub – far less short than others.

David Hicks, Norms and Nobility, 43.

Hicks’s educational vision is described by Gene Veith and Andrew Kern as “moral classicism” for good reason (Classical Education: The Movement Sweeping America, revised and updated, Capital Research Center: 2001; see pp. 37ff). In his restoration of “norms” Hicks seems to fuse the ideals of artistry, practical wisdom and philosophic, in the persons of master and pupil, as aspiring individuals. In this way his fusion represents dramatically the type of inquiry of the Great Books and humanities that would cultivate practical wisdom; even science “must be pulled down from its non-normative pedestal,” and be turned toward practical wisdom. Scientific “analysis must be framed within the normative inquiry [of human values] if science is to serve life, not destroy it” (Norms and Nobility, 145).

Reviving moral philosophy in the later years of K-12 education is not enough. Instead, we must fully recover the intellectual virtue of prudence as a major goal of education in our classical Christian schools and allow a vision of the Ideal Type to shape our curriculum and teaching methods in all subjects and grades.

The post The Counsels of the Wise, Part 2: Why Reviving Moral Philosophy Is Not Enough appeared first on .

When we compare these bite-sized pieces of “analysis” and “comprehension” to the artistry of grammar and rhetoric, for instance, we can see that Bloom’s Taxonomy has dwarfed the beauty and complexity of the educational enterprise in an effort to make it scientific and measurable. Through our exploration of Aristotle’s intellectual virtue of artistry or craftsmanship (techne in Greek), we’ve rediscovered the traditional nature of the arts and their situatedness in human culture and civilization. Treating this educational goal like a machine part that can be installed the same way in any number of factories around the world doesn’t quite do it justice. 

There is, however, a general method for training an apprentice in an art, but for competent training to occur, all the specifics of the art itself must be in view, and the teacher must be a competent craftsman himself to apprentice a student. We should not be surprised at the minimal attainments in intellectual complexity, speaking and writing ability, or piercing scientific inquiry of our students, when our teachers’ colleges are not aimed at developing paragons of intellectual virtue. After all, the student will become like his teacher. 

Of course, not everything is about intellectual attainment as it is conventionally understood. As we have seen, within the Aristotelian understanding of artistry are included athletics and sports, common and domestic arts, the professions and trades, fine and performing arts, as well the traditional liberal arts of language and number. All of these traditions have been developed in different ways over the centuries and it is the skills and sub-skills of these traditions of expertise that we are training students in, whether through deliberate or purposeful practice.

Apprenticeship in artistry ties together the heart, head and body in a unique way that will take us some way to restoring a truly Christian and classical vision for the goals of education. But artistry is not enough. In fact, what we are aiming for must necessarily take us further up and further in. As the tradition expressed in various ways, even the liberal arts themselves are preparatory. They are not the final end, but in themselves transcend toward something higher. Although as an intellectual virtue artistry involves the heart and head, it is best symbolized by the training of the hand. In the classical hierarchy of value, the heart must direct the skills of the hand as merely a part of the life well lived. 

The Intellectual Virtue of the Heart: Prudence

We must now move upward and enter the realm of the heart. Aristotle’s intellectual virtue of phronesis is often translated as practical wisdom or prudence. He defines it as “a reasoned and true state of capacity to act with regard to human goods” (Nicomachean Ethics, Book VI, ch. 5; rev. Oxford trans., 1801). If the intellectual virtue of artistry is concerned with our human ability to make things in the world, prudence refers to our ability to act, and to choose how we will act. In this connection we can return to Mortimer Adler’s helpful explanation of Aristotle in Aristotle for Everybody. He breaks down Aristotle’s conceptions of human beings into three categories: Man the Maker, Man the Doer and Man the Knower (16-17). Adler clarifies that these are more like dimensions than rigidly separated parts of the human being. Just as “a dimension is a direction in which I can move,” (16) human beings can make, act, and know. It is important to clarify that each of these dimensions is intellectual; as Adler explains,

Aristotle was very much concerned with the differences that distinguish these three kinds of thinking. He used the term ‘productive thinking’ to describe the kind of thinking that man engages in as a maker; ‘practical thinking’ to describe the kind that he engages in as a doer; and ‘speculative’ or ‘theoretical thinking’ to describe the kind he engages in as a knower. (17-18)

Aristotle’s five intellectual virtues fall neatly into these three dimensions of thinking. Artistry falls under our creative ability to make things in and of the world; prudence under our ability to deliberate about how we shall act, make choices and intentionally act to attain some good in the world; intuition, scientific knowledge and philosophic wisdom under our ability to know. In laying this out so neatly, Aristotle is attentive to the overlapping and interpenetrating character of these dimensions of our thinking. In regaining his terminology, we rediscover forgotten goals of education that we have been unable to correctly name for generations.

Prudence is one such forgotten gem. Adler goes on to describe the dimension of Man as Doer: 

In the second of these dimensions, doing, we have man the moral and social being—someone who can do right or wrong, someone who, by what he or she does or does not do, either achieves happiness or fails to achieve it, someone who finds it necessary to associate with other human beings in order to do what, as a human being, he or she feels impelled to do. (17)

If, as we contested (in Aristotle’s Virtue Theory and a Christian Purpose of Education), the ultimate purpose of Christian education is the eternal happiness of human beings through the manifestation of all the moral, intellectual and spiritual virtues to the glory of God in salvation, then prudence too cannot be left out of our educational paradigm. 

Foundations of a Christian Prudence

As an intellectual virtue, prudence sits at the center of a human being, tying a person’s enacted choices in the body to their mind. It represents the seat of a person’s will or ability to choose, and the locus of their affections and desires. The heart is the wellspring of life. As Jesus makes clear, it is not the beautiful things a person makes that show the character and ultimate destiny of an individual, but how the person lives; it is not what he knows, but what he does that shows the nature of a man. False prophets, those who presumptuously claim special knowledge from on high, will be recognized by their fruits:

Are grapes gathered from thornbushes, or figs from thistles? So, every healthy tree bears good fruit, but the diseased tree bears bad fruit. A healthy tree cannot bear bad fruit, nor can a diseased tree bear good fruit. Every tree that does not bear good fruit is cut down and thrown into the fire. Thus you will recognize them by their fruits. (Matt 7:16b-20 ESV)

That Jesus is not referring to people’s acts of production by the analogy of fruit is clear enough from the context. He goes on (7:21-23) to envision how even the most spiritual products of artistry—prophecy and exorcism and “mighty works”—are not reliable signs of a person’s genuineness, but only their actions: whether or not they are “workers of lawlessness” (7:23). 

Even if the New Testament does not retain Aristotle’s exact lexical distinction between practical wisdom and philosophic wisdom (phronesis and sophia), we can discern its prioritization of a practical wisdom for life that joins hands and head in a pure heart. For instance, consider how James challenges the believer who boasts in the wisdom of the mind:

Who is wise [Greek: sophos] and understanding [epistemon, scientifically knowledgeable?] among you? By his good conduct let him show his works in the meekness of wisdom. But if you have bitter jealousy and selfish ambition in your hearts, do not boast and be false to the truth. This is not the wisdom [sophia] that comes down from above, but is earthly, unspiritual [Greek: soulish], demonic. For where jealousy and selfish ambition exist, there will be disorder and every vile practice. But the wisdom [sophia] from above is first pure, then peaceable, gentle, open to reason, full of mercy and good fruits, impartial and sincere. (James 3:13-17)

What sort of wisdom should the Christian be primarily concerned with? Not the soulish wisdom of the world, typical even of the wisest pagans like Aristotle. It is a relational wisdom, characterized by humility and good conduct, rather than self-aggrandizement. While James uses the term sophia, he undoubtedly has something akin to practical wisdom in view. Notice how every instance of it has to do with actions in the world and relationships with others, not the comprehension and demonstration of universals in the highest subjects, as Aristotle had defined sophia.

We might pause here to note that even in Aristotle’s day, his proposed distinctions between these intellectual virtues were not followed well or strictly. He notes in Book VI, ch. 7 that in his day sophia was used of the “most finished exponents [of the arts], e.g. to Phidias as a sculptor and to Polyclitus as a maker of statues, and here we mean nothing by wisdom except excellence in art” (1801). In no age or culture can we trust the words and categories that are commonly used as the best or wisest way to map reality. This again is why Bloom’s Taxonomy was doomed from the start to simply reaffirm the modernist assumptions of its own day. Taking teachers’ own terms for their goals as the starting point for a taxonomy of educational objectives is an anti-philosophical move, savoring of pragmatism. It assumes the average Joe or Mary has the truth without inquiry or instruction. Aristotle, on the other hand, is a leading proponent of beginning with the common language conceptions, but then challenging them and attempting to explain them from within a broader philosophical frame of reference.

But returning to our foundations for a Christian prudence, we could go on to enumerate a host of passages which demonstrate the Bible’s emphasis on this lost virtue. St Paul’s claim that “knowledge puffs up but love builds up” (1 Cor 8:1) points the way to a Gospel-shaped prudence that sacrifices for others, rather than holding up my own individual happiness as the final end. It is this agape way of choosing and acting in the world that transcends Aristotle’s earthly goods with a spiritual frame of reference and an imperishable wreath (1 Cor 9:25). In case this seems too far-fetched an endorsement of Christian prudence, we could cite our Lord’s direct command to his disciples, “Behold I am sending you out as sheep in the midst of wolves; be therefore wise [phronemoi, prudent] as serpents and innocent as doves” (Matt 10:16), which likewise baptizes a worldly prudence with a spiritual purity.

“Every scriptural text,” according to Paul, “is God-breathed and profitable for instruction, for rebuke, for correction, for an education [paideia, discipline or enculturation process] that is in righteousness, that the person devoted to God may be competent, equipped for every good work” (2 Tim 3:16-17). The Bible itself aims at the moral and intellectual instruction in prudence that will enable the believer to live well. I can’t think of any higher endorsement of a prudence-focused form of education than that.

The major concern of the biblical book of Proverbs is manifestly analogous to Aristotle’s prudence, concerning more how a man lives than what he knows abstractly. While there are occasional glimmers of how the Hebrew term hokhma (wisdom) includes knowledge of the natural world and its innerworkings (see e.g. 8:22-31 and compare Solomon’s wisdom in 1 Kings 4:29-34), the predominant focus of a Proverbs education is the practical wisdom to live a flourishing life in submission to God’s moral instruction. That after all is the tenor of the whole book, it is an education in prudence that the proverbs themselves aim at. (This has far-reaching implications for a pedagogy of prudence, by the way, which we will explore in a subsequent article.) The book of Ecclesiastes, likewise, pushes the boundaries of prudence “under the sun,” in order to establish a God-centered, immanent frame of reference for a life well lived: 

The end of the matter; all has been heard. Fear God and keep his commandments, for this is the whole duty of man. For God will bring every deed into judgment, with every secret thing, whether good or evil. (12:13-14)

Both the awareness of future judgment and the love of God displayed on the cross must color the Christian educational vision of prudence. But they do not eliminate it. 

We have already had occasion to cite the author of Hebrews, who calls for Christian maturity: “But solid food is for the mature, for those who have their powers of discernment trained by constant practice to distinguish good from evil” (5:14). The term ‘discernment’ helps bring out the critical relationship between prudence and the ability to deliberate correctly in Aristotle. Similarly to how we must discern between good and evil in biblical terminology, deliberation is different from inquiry into truth, for Aristotle, but instead names when a person thinks correctly about human goods and the courses of action that he might choose. 

The Moral Virtues and Prudence

We already discussed this passage from Hebrews while exploring the analogy between artistry and morality. We noted that “constant practice” is involved as the foundation of a developed discernment. Moral habits and virtues enable the flowering of prudence as a youth’s reason develops. The heart of prudence must have a bodily foundation in the nerves even as it transcends into the rational nature of a human being. As C.S. Lewis put it in The Abolition of Man, with which we critiqued Bloom’s Taxonomy near the start of this series,

Without the aid of trained emotions the intellect is powerless against the animal organism. I had sooner play cards against a man who was quite sceptical about ethics, but bred to believe that ‘a gentleman does not cheat’, than against an irreproachable moral philosopher who had been brought up among sharpers. In battle it is not syllogisms that will keep the reluctant nerves and muscles to their post in the third hour of the bombardment. The crudest sentimentalism… about a flag or a country or a regiment will be of more use. We were told it all long ago by Plato. As the king governs by his executive, so Reason in man rust rule the mere appetites by means of the ‘spirited element’. The head rules the belly through the chest—the seat, as Alanus tells us, of Magnanimity, of emotions organized by trained habit into stable sentiments. (24-25)

While the moral virtues are strictly speaking outside the purview of our study on Aristotle’s intellectual virtues, they are intricately tied to the acquisition of prudence. In fact, for Aristotle, each one is impossible without the other. As he puts it, “the function of man is achieved only in accordance with practical wisdom as well as with moral excellence; for excellence makes the aim right, and practical wisdom the things leading to it” (VI.12; 1807). 

A man in battle who is cowardly aims incorrectly at his own preservation, since his nerves and emotions are not trained to endure the possibility of his own death. The proper habit training and implantation of ideas (“Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori,”; “How sweet and honorable it is to die for one’s country,” from Horace’s Odes, III.2.13; see Lewis, Abolition of Man, 21-22) would have provided him with the right aim: what we would call his moral duty. Practical wisdom would guide him in thinking rationally about the choices he must make on the way to the set of aims his gut and chest have attuned him to. Only those who have been trained by “constant practice” can discern or deliberate correctly regarding what is good and right. 

Perhaps the best way to understand this as moderns is through the idea of conscience. It is not quite right for Jiminy Cricket to say, “Always let your conscience be your guide.” In actual fact, the conscience itself is precisely what must be trained and renewed, if we are to discern correctly. As Paul says, “Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewal of your mind, that by testing you may discern what is the will of God, what is good and acceptable and perfect” (Rom 12:2). The mind or conscience—Paul uses the term nous (“intution”), but it seems to have the nuance here of a person’s frame of reference for moral decision-making specifically—must be transformed. In addition, continual testing or deliberating is required if a person is to discern God’s will. The conscience is key, but not as an infallible guide.

Charlotte Mason, the late 19th and early 20th century British Christian educator, understood this well. In her fourth volume entitled Ourselves, Mason discusses a series of what she calls “Instructors of Conscience”: Poetry, Novels, Essays, History, Philosophy, Theology, Nature, Science, Art, Sociology and Self-Knowledge (Book II, pp. 71-104). This list puts the lie to the supposition that we can do nothing as educators to influence the moral formation of our students. If we only consider for a moment why many Great Works on these subjects were written in the first place, we can quel the nagging modern fallacy that education should have nothing to do with a child’s “personal” moral values. 

The subjects of study named by Charlotte Mason are all worthy of fuller consideration when we explore how in fact we can educate our children for prudence: the great answer being that we are to open our students’ minds and hearts to the counsels of the wise, as the name for this mini-series suggests. But for now we can note the dangers of the uninstructed conscience in Mason’s words:

There is no end to the vagaries of the uninstructed conscience. It is continually straining out the gnat and swallowing the camel. The most hardened criminal has his conscience; and he justifies that which he does by specious reasons. ‘Society is against’ him, he says; he ‘has never had a fair chance.’ Why should he ‘go about ragged and hungry when another man rides in his carriage and eats and drinks his fill?’ ‘If that man has so much, let him keep it if he can; if cleverer wits than his contrive to ease him of a little, that is only fair play.’ Thus do reason and inclination support one another in the mind of the Ishmael whose hand is against every man; and, if every man’s hand is against him, that is all the more reason, he urges, that he should get what he can take out of life. (vol. 4 p. 60)

Moral reasoning is natural to all human beings. But the uninstructed conscience cannot be trusted to deliberate or reason correctly regarding what is good for itself or for human beings generally. All the humanities at least, are aimed to one extent or another at passing down some of humanity’s hard-won wisdom about how best to act and live as a human being. 

One of the most damning sins of Bloom’s taxonomy in this regard is that it directs a teacher’s focus away from the beating heart of the subjects she is teaching. Instead of drawing moral wisdom from the heart of a novel or history book, we drain the life out of it through a host of analytical exercises and comprehension questions, thus literally trivializing the counsels of the wise. (I have discussed this problem before in The Flow of Thought, Part 8: Restoring the School of Philosophers.) In this mini-series on educating for prudence through the counsels of the wise, I hope to lay out a rationale and method for instructing the consciences of our students through the subjects that we teach. In addition to training our students’ hands, we must educate their hearts.

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In the quotation above, Charlotte Mason identifies what she believes are the three instruments of education at a teacher’s disposal: atmosphere, discipline, and life. In my first article in this series, I explored the instrument of atmosphere. 

In Mason’s view, the sort of atmosphere a teacher builds is dependent primarily on her view of her students. If students are primarily future contributors to the economy, then the efficiency-driven model of a factory will do. The priority will be to standardize the content as much as possible and boil down the educational process to an assembly line of simple, repeatable acts and interchangeable parts. Likewise, if students are information processors at core, then the atmosphere of a computer lab will suffice. Pack as much information as possible into a lecture, or textbook, and call on students to analyze the data as if they were little Microsoft Excel humanoids.

But if students are persons, relational beings made in the image of God, that are endowed with 1) minds to contemplate and create 2) wills to choose the good (or evil) 3) physical bodies to steward and 4) souls to connect with God Himself, then the task of education, and the atmosphere of a classroom by implication, will look very different.

In today’s article, I will move on to the second instrument of Mason’s triad: “Education is a Discipline.” We will see that, like atmosphere, discipline, or training, is very much an instrument with the idea of students as persons in view. God created humans as persons hard-wired for growth. Either they grow or decline over time; there is no such thing as a static human being. It therefore falls to parents and teachers to consider how they will help children grow, especially through supporting them to develop good habits from a young age. These habits over time become the soil for a child’s moral life to spring up. This is the instrument of discipline. 

Preparing Children for the World…But Which World?

Let us acknowledge it: life is difficult. People face a variety of challenges throughout life, whether they be financial, relational, professional, physical, or otherwise. This realization finds credence across philosophies and religions. The writer of Ecclesiastes observes that life is full of toil and ultimately meaningless (apart from God). The Buddha built a whole religion on four noble truths, the first being that “life is suffering.” There is no shortage of trials we will encounter as human beings. Our posture should therefore pivot from one of full avoidance of these trials, but rather an acceptance and preparation for how to overcome them.

In the classic dystopian novel Brave New World (First Harper Perennial Modern Classics, 2006), originally published by Harper and Brothers in 1932, author Aldous Huxley imagines a future world state in which the trials described above are all but eliminated. Through genetically engineering humans for specific castes, abolishing traditional moral norms, and mass producing happiness-producing drugs for daily consumption, the brave new world is one of ever-present, uninterrupted, happiness.

Interestingly, in this world, there seems to be no need for nobility, heroism, or discipline for that matter. It is a tailor-made civilization in which natural impulses are free to run their course with no fear of the consequences. Habits can continue to be helpful, but there are mechanisms already built into society to prevent real negative consequences from occurring. The startling result: “Anyone can be virtuous now” (238).

Of course, this is not our world, at least, not yet. The children we instruct, whether in our homes or classrooms, must be prepared to encounter challenges, friction points, trials, and opportunities to do what is right. This struggle is constituted both externally (in the circumstances they face) and internally (in mastering their own thoughts, desires, and choices).

Raising children to be disciplined, therefore, should be no afterthought in education. It is a primary responsibility for raising strong, thoughtful, noble, and virtuous men and women.

The Discipline of Habits 

Charlotte Mason believed that the key to helping children build strong moral wills and productive intellectual lives is through instilling good habits. These habits are to be trained, not through the harsh ruling of a Victorian task-master, or the behavioral manipulation of rewards systems, but through relationship, accountability, and support. Maryellen St. Cyr, co-founder of Ambleside Schools International, writes, “The idea of education as a discipline encompasses the full realm of education, taking into account its varied relationships–intellectual, moral, physical, religious, and social, as well as the great potential of persons to move in directions of change and growth” (When Children Love to Learn, 89).

This growth can be developed from a young age through habit training. In modern education, the general thought is to “let kids be kids” and by that it is meant for teachers to permit the majority of children’s natural impulses to run free in the classroom. The heart behind this sentiment, of course, is a desire for the children to be happy. But Mason’s profound insight, which is replete with biblical truth, is that equipping students to develop control over these impulses is actually what will set them up well for a life of flourishing. As one proverb puts it, “Train up a child in the way he should go: and when he is old, he will not depart from it” (Proverbs 22:6, ESV).

We can begin to see that through helping students develop good habits–attention, self-control, respects for others, kindness, and responsibility–we are preparing them for a life of growth. In Home Education, Charlotte Mason writes, “It is unchangeably true that the child who is not being consistently raised to a higher and a higher platform will sink to a lower and a lower. Wherefore, it is as much the parent’s duty to educate his child into moral strength and purpose and intellectual activity as it is to feed him and clothe him” (103).

As teachers work to train habits in the classroom, they must always keep the vision of building up persons in view. To differentiate between building up persons and mere external conformity, Maryellen St. Cyr makes this table of distinction:

What Neuroscientists Have to Say

As we have noted on Educational Renaissance on multiple occasions, such as here, the practice of habit training, which is what Charlotte Mason primarily means by the instrument of discipline, finds encouraging support in modern neuroscience. Each time we perform an act, we are rewiring our neural pathways and even creating new brain cells, processes called neuroplasticity and neurogenesis.

Mason, herself a lover of modern research, was tracking the earliest scientific discoveries of this phenomenon. She writes, “New brain tissue is being constantly formed at a startlingly rapid rate: one wonders at what age the child has no longer any part left of that brain with which he was born (Home Education, 115). 

Later she goes on to conclude:

“What follows? Why, that the actual conformation of the child’s brain depends upon the habits which the parents permit or encourage; and that the habits of the child produce the character of the man…”

Charlotte Mason, Home Education, 118.

What a profound and even mysterious insight, this connection between moral philosophy and modern neuroscience. God, in His providence, truly created us as mind-body unities. Our brains affect our morals and our morals affect our brains. And while the non-religious materialist might use these scientific discoveries to make the case that even moral phenomenon has a natural explanation, I find the more compelling conclusion to be that this sort of moral-biological synthesis is exactly what we should expect of a universe fashioned by a wise Creator.

From Habits to Virtues

The Greek philosopher Aristotle is one of the earliest proponents of habit training. He draws a straight line from habits through virtue to happiness itself. But unlike in Brave New World, in which happiness is the maximization of pleasure, Aristotle tethers happiness to virtue. Happiness is an activity that is manifested over a whole life as humans align their lives with virtues laid down by reason (A History of Philosophy, Volume 1: From Greece to Rome by Frederick Coppleston, p. 334). However, unlike Cynic contemporaries in his day, Aristotle did not excise pleasure from the equation completely. He acknowledged that circumstances can and do play a role in one’s overall flourishing. But the pathway to happiness is ultimately through virtuous activity, not pleasure-seeking. To be truly happy, one must live a life of activity in accordance with virtue. 

So how do humans become virtuous? Aristotle believed it was through practice, by cultivating good habits. People become virtuous by doing virtuous acts. A soldier becomes courageous, not through reading about it, though that will help, but through stepping foot in the arena. Likewise, a child becomes honest by practicing telling the truth.

Now, some may anticipate the objection of circular thinking. How can one do virtuous acts without being virtuous? But how can one be virtuous without doing virtuous acts? 

Philosopher Frederick Coppleston offers this response on behalf of Aristotle: “We begin by doing acts which are objectively virtuous, without having a flex knowledge of the acts and a deliberate choice of the acts as good, a choice resulting from an habitual disposition…The accusation of a vicious circle is thus answered by the distinction between the acts which create the good disposition and the acts which flow from the good disposition once it has been created” (335). 

In other words, virtue formation is a process. We train children to begin acting in certain ways, holding them to certain expectations, even before they fully understand the “why.” To be sure, we want to relationally come beside them and discuss how particular habits are for the good of themselves and others. But we also need to be patient, understanding that the process of moral development is a lifelong journey, even for adults, one in which moral knowledge and practice slowly grow more and more aligned.

Towards a Christian View of Virtue Formation

So far, I have been discussing the notions of happiness, virtues, and habits without much reference to our Christian faith. To begin making these connections, I find Kevin Clark and Ravi Jain’s comments in The Liberal Arts Tradition (Classical Academic Press, 2019) really helpful.

Clark and Jain augment a Christian, classical notion of Aristotle’s conception of virtue by connecting virtue to participation in Christ (137). Virtue is more than human effort accompanied by the goods that come of it. It is the path of following Christ and growing in Christlikeness. It encompasses increasing spiritual intimacy with Him through obedience and reliance on the Holy Spirit. Virtue for a Christian begins by being raised with Christ and becoming a new creation (Colossians 3). When this happens, the righteousness of Christ becomes ours, and we are empowered to begin down the path of sanctification, or personal holiness.

There is much, much more to unpack here theologically, but I will need to put this work off for another article. Suffice it to say that for Christians, habit training and virtual formation should be inextricably linked to our walk with Christ and growing in unity with Him.

Conclusion

C.S. Lewis once wrote, “For the wise men of old the cardinal problem had been how to conform the soul to reality, and the solution had been knowledge, self-discipline, and virtue (The Abolition of Man, 77). By training students in habits, we are preparing students for the real world. This world is not one free of struggle, pain, and unrestricted passion, as fantasized in Brave New World. Rather it is a world of both comfort and struggle, joy and pain, self-restraint and pleasure.

The well-trained student can navigate both, but not by accident. Rather, it is through year after year of virtue formation through habit training. As the metal worker bends his material into proper shape, so we has humans, through practicing habits, can gradually build lives aligned with virtue. United with Christ, we acknowledge that this strength comes not from us, but from the Holy Spirit, as His power is made perfect in our weakness.

If you want to go deeper into habit training, your next step is to download our free eBook. Enjoy!

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There are two types of education Lewis describes in his essay “The Parthenon and the Optative.” One type emphasizes “appreciation” whereas the other “begins with hard, dry things like grammar, and dates, and prosody.” This typology is worthy of exploration and provides a level of insight that could unlock our understanding of academic excellence. In this article we’ll explore an important yet often overlooked essay on education by C.S. Lewis. Along the way we will reflect on how we can assimilate his perspective into our own educational renewal movements. In particular, we will look at the role examinations play in cultivating an true appreciation for great literature and place Lewis’s understanding of exams alongside that of Charlotte Mason.

On Seeing Someone Else’s Religious Experience

Let’s begin with the analogy. The Parthenon is the symbol of the type that emphasizes “appreciation.” Lewis places the term “appreciation” in quotes for this type or symbol because he observes how it is an empty or misguided form of appreciation. When he first refers to the kind of appreciation elicited by this Parthenon type, he indicates it “ends in gush.” This burst of exaggerated enthusiasm has no substance to it, no depth of knowledge informing one’s appreciation. Lewis later states that educationists calling for this type of appreciation “are moved by a kind of false reverence for the Muses.” An education of this kind aims at something lofty, and yet it cannot deliver on its promise to produce highly cultured individuals because of its lack of substance.

The Parthenon was a temple dedicated to Athena, the patron goddess of Athens. It served as the center of religious life for the Athenians. This Doric-style temple was a symbol of the wealth and power of Athens, then at the height of its cultural influence throughout the Mediterranean world. Commissioned by Pericles, a leading statesmen who promoted Athenian culture, the Parthenon became the largest temple of its time, crafted by the architects Ictinus and Callicrates and adorned by the works of sculptor Phidias. Today the Parthenon stands in ruins, although its majesty can still be appreciated by the millions of tourists that make the site an iconic destination.

Compare the gush of “appreciation” by a tourist who has made the Parthenon a bucket list destination to an individual who has an understanding of the architectural features at play, of the geometric principles on display, of the history it represents, or the Greek religious rites performed in the temple. The point Lewis is making relies on this comparison. To be trained to “appreciate” without doing the hard work of learning detailed concepts in grammar, history and mathematics, makes one seem like they are cultured, but it is all a façade. Lewis writes:

“It teaches a man to feel vaguely cultured while he remains in fact a dunce. It makes him think he is enjoying poems he can’t construe. It qualifies him to review books he does not understand, and to be intellectual without intellect. It plays havoc with the very distinction between truth and error.”

C.S. Lewis, “The Parthenon and the Optative” in On Stories: And Other Essays on Literature (Harcourt, 1982), 109.

This may be overly harsh, but Lewis is making the point that despite the best intentions of instilling a love of learning by removing the difficult or seemingly obtuse aspects of knowledge, students actually gain neither hard-earned knowledge nor true appreciation. You can’t have one without the other. While it is true that we can experience wonder at the sublime and can appreciate the majesty of the Parthenon even now in its ruined state, we cannot confuse those feelings of wonder with a truly informed understanding and intellect. Beholding the Parthenon without a depth of informing knowledge is like observing someone else’s religious experience. I can identify it. I can even appreciate it. But it is not my own. And to claim it as such is a lie.

On Grammar and True Literacy

The second analogy is the Optative. This is a grammatical mood that expresses a wish, hope or desire. English verbs don’t have a specific morphological feature to express the optative as ancient Greek has. Instead, we commandeer a variety of verbal syntactical relationships to construct the optative. Perhaps the most famous optative phrase is “May the force for be with you.” It uses the modal verb “may” along with the subjunctive “be” to provide an optative meaning. Sometimes we create the optative without the modal verb, as in “Peace be with you,” which implies the verb “may.” Sometimes we use phrases such as “if only” to approximate the optative as in “If only I were able to understand the optative.” You can even negate the optative as in “May it never be” (this – μὴ γένοιτο – is Paul’s expression through Romans).

Lewis makes this seemingly obscure grammatical concept the symbol for another type of education, one that “begins with hard, dry things like grammar, and dates, and prosody.” He goes on to claim that such a beginning “has at least the chance of ending in a real appreciation which is equally hard and firm though not equally dry.” It is this “real appreciation” that Lewis himself had to be trained in. Alan Jacobs describes the educational training Lewis received by William Kirkpatrick – referred to as Kirk, the Old Knock or the Great Knock – as one where logic crashed in on his sentimentality. Jacobs described the scene of Lewis’s first encounter with Kirkpatrick in the Surrey countryside:

“‘If ever a man came near to being a purely logical entity, that man was Kirk.’ Even on the walk from the railway station to Kirk’s house he subjected Jack, not to a ‘lukewarm shower bath of sentimentality,’ but to a relentless exposure of the boy’s ignorance and unreason – all because Jack has carelessly ventured the comment that the scenery of Surrey was ‘wilder’ than he had expected.”

Alan Jacobs, The Narnian (Harper, 2005), 46.

One might hear in Jack Lewis’s comment a genuine appreciation for the scenery of Surrey. But Kirkpatrick, his private tutor, was relentless about the definition of words, of actual knowledge of specifics. Jack “had no justification for having ‘any opinion whatever’ about Surrey’s flora, fauna, or geology.” Real appreciation of the scenery of Surrey comes not through superficial comments, but through a studied consideration of the details.

Now, does every child need to be put through his or her paces in the way Jack Lewis was as a teenager? Not necessarily. But one can trace the master apologist Lewis would become to the training received by Kirkpatrick. This leads me to consider the role we play in enabling our students to grow in their literary capacity.

Literacy, in our modern culture, has often been associated with the basic ability to read and write, often comparing one nation’s literacy rate to another. Another way of viewing literacy has to do with reading lots of books, or any books at all. I recall one of the consequences of the Harry Potter series was that children were said to be reading more. There’s something to be said about a wide and varied reading regimen and encouraging our students to always have a book to read is wise. However, there is another view of literacy that is worthy of consideration, and that is the ability to read deeply. What I mean by this is to be able to not only comprehend what is in a book, but to be stretched by the nature of the literature, to be challenged by the greatness of the ideas grappled with, or to have a grasp of the literary devices employed. The first view asks the question, can the person simply read at all. The second view asks the question, how much reading can the person consume. The third view asks the question, what is the highest quality of reading the person can achieve.

On this final view, we could say that a person could express appreciation for a Shakespearean sonnet, or for Milton’s Paradise Lost, or for Plato’s Republic. One can do so without ever really reading it, simply because they are widely recognized for their greatness. Their opinion might be correct, but they have not really engaged with the text. Compare this with a person who has a) the skill to read these texts with understanding and b) the opportunity to grapple with them thoroughly. For this person to express appreciation does so from a very different vantage point than the general consensus, even though that opinion might agree with the general consensus.

On Examinations and What Really Matters

Having set up what Lewis means by his two types of education, we are now prepared to engage with his ideas about the role of examinations. In doing so, I find it helpful to bring alongside Lewis the writings of Charlotte Mason, who (perhaps surprisingly) has similar views on things, even though she arrives there by a different pathway.

Lewis sees examinations on literary subjects as necessary because they are useful in determining the quality of the students’ reading. He writes:

“For this very reason elementary examinations on literary subjects ought to confine themselves to just those dry and factual questions which are so often ridiculed. The questions were never supposed to test appreciation; the idea was to find out whether the boy had read his books. It was the reading, not the being examined, which was expected to do him good. And this, so far from being a defect in such examinations is just what renders them useful or even tolerable.”

Lewis, “The Parthenon and the Optative,” 110.

There’s much to unpack here. First, we must recognize that the words “dry” and “factual” are in the language of those who would ridicule examinations. Examining points of grammar, vocabulary, use of literary devices, tracking characterization, plot devices or authorial style don’t have to be dry or merely factual. But testing these items can elucidate how skillfully a student has read the text. Second, Lewis is not opposed to appreciation. In fact, he is adamant about the impact books ought to have upon readers. However, we need to assess and verify that the book has been properly understood and that the knowledge has been actually assimilated. Finally, I am struck by the idea that “the reading . . . was expected to do him good.” I find this aligns quite nicely with Charlotte Mason’s insistence that only the best books ought to be selected in the curriculum. Why is this? Because we want to be feeding our minds and our souls with the best intellectual foods we can. Great books, though, require a certain amount of acquired skill to read well. Good reading allows the reading to do have its good effect.

Charlotte Mason address a similar type of question when she considers “How can examinations be made a test of English without destroying the love of literature?” With Lewis now ringing in our ears, we can perhaps perceive the false dichotomy here. Because we want to instill a true love of literature, we must place examinations before our students. The fundamental level of examination occurs through narration. She writes:

“History, European as well as English, runs in harness with literature. Some Syntax is necessary and a good deal of what may be called historical Grammar, but, not in order to teach the art of correct writing and speaking; this is a native art, and the beautiful consecutive and eloquent speech of young scholars in narrating what they have read is a thing to be listened to not without envy.”

Charlotte Mason, Towards a Philosophy of Education, 269.

Notice how history and literature are aligned with syntax and grammar, resulting in beautiful and eloquent narrations. Now there are narrations that we might call consecutive, meaning they occur throughout the days and weeks of the school year, and then there are terminal examinations that occur at the end of a semester. She writes:

“The terminal examinations are of great importance. They are not merely and chiefly tests of knowledge but records which are likely to be permanent. There are things which every child must know, every child, for the days have gone by when ‘the education befitting a gentleman’ was our aim.”

Charlotte Mason, Towards a Philosophy of Education, 272.

These tests or examinations aren’t simply to verify that what was learned this term is remembered, they are “permanent records” assimilated into the child. It assesses whether an indelible mark has been made. So what Mason envisages is not an exam for which students cram and forget. It examines the historical facts, the grammatical points, the meaning of the text as a sacred trust that “every child must know.”

Mason describes what the typical scholar covers in a semester:

“These read in a term from one thousand to between two and three thousand pages, according to age and class, in a large number of set books; the quantity set for each lesson allows of only a single reading. The reading is tested by narration, or by writing on a test passage. No revision (US: review) is attempted when the terminal examination is at hand; because too much ground has been covered to allow of any ‘looking up.’ What the children have read they know, and write on any part of it with ease and fluency, in vigorous English. They usually spell well. During the examinations, which last a week, the children cover say from twenty to sixty sheets of Cambridge paper, according to age and class; but if ten times as many questions were set on the work studied most likely they would cover ten times as much paper. It rarely happens that all the children in a class are not able to answer all the questions set in such subjects as history, literature, citizenship, geography, science. But here differences manifest themselves; some children do better in history, some in science, some in arithmetic, others in literature; some, again, write copious answers and a few write sparsely; but practically all know the answers to the set questions.”

Charlotte Mason, Towards a Philosophy of Education, 241.

This is an amazing passage, and one that might be critiqued for grandstanding. However, Mason was promoting an education for all and demonstrating that these methods produced results for middle- and lower-class children. I imagine Lewis would look upon these children as proficient while also well positioned to have a real appreciation for the literature they had learned. (Note: you can look at actual exams for different age levels used in the PNEU schools and even some of Mason’s own exam questions at https://www.amblesideonline.org/pneu).

Bringing it back to Lewis, there is a perception that required reading and examinations ruins good literature. He concludes his essay addressing this claim:

“Of course we meet many people who explain to us that they would by now have been great readers of poetry if it had not been ‘spoiled for them’ at school by ‘doing’ it for examinations of the old kind. It is theoretically possible. Perhaps they would by now have been saints if no one had every examined them in Scripture. . . . It may be so: but why should we believe that it is. We have only their word for it; and how do they know?”

Lewis, “The Parthenon and the Optative,” 112.

One of reasons why I think Mason pairs so nicely with Lewis on this point is not that they necessarily see eye to eye on every detail pedagogically, but that examinations can actually celebrate acquired knowledge and validate the assimilation of what is best in the books we read. Not only can we know that a child has become a great reader of poetry (or history or science), but the student can also know they have become a great reader.

As you plan for the new school year ahead, hopefully this reflection on the two types of education will inspire you to engage your students in deep reading and deliberate practice. It may even be the case that these ideas will help you formulate new ways to test, quiz and examine your students in ways that align well with what we might consider our true aims: to love learning, to appreciate great books, to flourish as human beings, and to live godly lives. That alignment comes not by doing away with exams, but by seeing how exams fit into the bigger picture of those lofty aims.

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Consider the painting Marble Champion. This 1939 piece features three children, one girl and two boys. It is painted in such a way that one only sees the children and the marbles. There is no physical context given. The viewer is drawn into a world solely inhabited by children at play. The faces of the children tell a story of triumph and indignation as the red-haired girl seems about to win to the dismay of the black-haired boy. The blond-haired boy expectantly awaits the final throw. Imagine how such a idyllic scene warmed the hearts of Americans in the midst of the Great Depression and on the cusp of war in Europe.

Childhood has not always been idyllic and has undergone transformation over the centuries. Among one of the greatest achievements over the last century was the dramatic increase in the survival rate of children. As recently as 1950, the global youth mortality rate was as high as 27%, meaning that only three of every four children could be expected to live to 15 years of age and beyond. In 2020 the World Health Organization reports global youth mortality at 3.7%. Keeping children alive has been one of the significant factors in growing the world population, which has not been a bad thing. With a greater population, we have seen the rise in new technologies, an expansion of available food, and an actual diminution of deaths by warfare.

One of the great landmarks in the history of childhood was a fresh perspective on children as persons that emerged during the Renaissance era. In this article I intend to explore the ways in which childhood, or the perception of childhood, changed during the Renaissance with a view of understanding better what it means to view children as whole persons.

Renaissance Childhood

The transformation of society from the late Middle Ages to the Renaissance has been variously understood. In many respects, we can see a tremendous amount of continuity between the ancient world, the Middle Ages and the Renaissance era. However, certain landmarks differentiate the old world from the new. The fall of Constantinople, for instance, ushered in a new era of learning in the West, as Byzantine scholars fled military conquests of the Ottomans. These scholars brought with them manuscripts of ancient authors that were either unknown or forgotten in the West. The Italian Renaissance, centered in Florence, brought a cultural renewal based on a flourishing of interest in classical texts.

Renaissance humanism during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries applied the great works and artifacts of Greece and Rome to reconsider the social institutions of the day. This focus on what we might call the humanities contributed to an emphasis on virtue ethics and paideia. With virtue ethics, the humanists saw that the cultivation of moral character emancipated the individual from duties or rules. Virtue went hand in hand with paideia, a view of education as the training of young persons as virtuous members of the state. The humanists envisioned the liberal arts as the means of liberating the individual from the constraints of social institutions prominent during the Middle Ages. Writes:

“The writings of Dante, and particularly the doctrines of Petrarch and humanists like Machiavelli, emphasized the virtues of intellectual freedom and individual expression. In the essays of Montaigne the individualistic view of life received perhaps the most persuasive and eloquent statement in the history of literature and philosophy.”

Steven Kreis, “Renaissance Humanism” at historyguide.org

One can trace transformations in society, from the Protestant Reformation to the democratization of nations, to the humanist impulses of the Renaissance. So, too, the transformation of the view of childhood. Although viewed as an extreme view, Philippe Aries, a prominent French medieval scholar during the 1960s and 1970s, argued that “in medieval society, the idea of childhood did not exist.” (Ariès, Centuries of Childhood (1962): 125.) He reasons that works of art and literature depict children as little adults. In a largely agrarian society, children were expected to work from the earliest ages. The high infant mortality rate also meant adults were less inclined to become attached to an idealized view of childhood. Aries’s view that childhood is largely a social construct is potentially problematic, but there is some veracity that Renaissance humanism went a long way toward transforming what childhood meant.

Viewing children as whole persons emerged during this era. The humanist impulse to train children in virtue considers them as having moral agency even during their youth. Similarly, there was a somewhat sentimental view of the emotional bonds between children and their parents. Educational thinkers of the Renaissance period encouraged the emotional connection between parent and child. Writing about Leon Alberti, the Italian educationist, Julian Vitullo contextualizes his work:

“Male pedagogues in Renaissance Florence participated in debates about different styles of discipline with the assumption that the emotional bonds that children form with adults would influence their own behavior as citizens. Pedagogues stressed the importance of recreation when they discussed the need to raise children with love, joy, and serenity.”

Julian Vitullo, “Fashioning Fatherhood: Leon Battista Alberti’s Art of Parenting.” Pages 341-353 in Albrecht Classen, ed. Childhood in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2005), 347.

Notice how discipline goes together with love, joy and serenity. Vitullo spells this out in more detail with regard to Alberti’s educational philosophy, “Alberti makes clear in his dialogue that he is aware of different notions of pedagogy and chooses a model of affection and positive enforcement that had already been detailed by classical thinkers such as Quintillian” (352). Alberti may have in mind here the advice given by Quintillian to fathers in his Institutio Oratio, “I would, therefore, have a father conceive the highest hopes of his son from the moment of his birth. If he does so, he will be more careful about the groundwork of his education” (Inst. 1.1).

This transformation of childhood spread from Italy to other locales in Europe as the Renaissance spread. Erasmus of Rotterdam wrote a brief treatise on the education of children. In this he concludes:

“Consider how dear a possession you’re son is, how diverse a thing it is and a matter of much work to come by learning, and how noble also the same is, what a readiness is in all children’s wits to learn, what agility is in the mind of man how easily those things be learned which be best and agreeable to nature, especially if they be taught of learned and gentle masters by the way of play.”

Erasmus, The Education of Children, transl. Richard Sherry, P.iii.

We see here a recognition that children are ready and eager to learn. Erasmus advises that children be taught by masters who both exhibit expertise but also gentleness, which in this context means a lack of harsh punishments. The word “play” is interesting, and I wonder if there is a play on the word ludus in the original Latin, a term that can mean both play and school.

Connecting the Traditions

The Renaissance holds many compelling connections to our educational renewal movement. The reappropriation of classical texts led to a renewal of educational theories and a reappraisal of the child as a whole person. Yet, we can see echoes of this view of children at other stages in the traditions, both ancient and modern.

To begin with, when we consider the biblical view of children, there are multiple passages that promote a high view of children. Take, for example, Proverbs 22:6, “Train up a child in the way he should go; even when he is old he will not depart from it.” The English translation is somewhat misleading, as it literally says to train the child “about his pathway.” There seems to be an indication that the child is fully capable of walking in the right moral pathway in his youth.

The prophet Malachi promises that in the renewal of Israel, God will turn “the hearts of fathers to their children and the hearts of children to their fathers” (4:6). The emotional connection between parent and child sounds here similar to the advice of the Renaissance pedagogues. The essence of a renewed society resides in the home where there’s a bastion of deep emotional bonds.

Jesus admonition to “let the little children come to me” (Matt. 19:14) speaks to a profound capacity in childhood for faith. Jesus’ view of children is profound indeed. Consider his an earlier passage in Matthew in which Jesus declares, “I thank you, Father, Lord of heaven and earth, that you have hidden these things from the wise and understanding and revealed them to little children” (11:25). The deepest matters of heaven and earth revealed to little children. As we consider a biblical theology of childhood, statements like these point to an understanding of the child as having great capacity for faith and learning.

Viewing children as whole persons – capable of profound thought, faith and moral direction – implies a form of education that trains children in their affections. I like how Christopher Perrin connects ordo amoris to the teachings of Christ. He writes:

“Jesus often signals an ordo amoris, telling the rich, young ruler there is one thing he lacks (Matt. 19) and telling Martha that though she is busy about many things, Mary has chosen what is best: to converse with him rather than prepare dinner (Luke 10). When Jesus is asked what the greatest commandment is, he responds that there are two: to love God with your whole heart and to love your neighbor as yourself (Matt. 22). Jesus seems to believe that there is a divinely ordered hierarchy of loves and pleasures.”

Christopher Perrin, “I Would Like to Order… an Education,” Inside Classical Education.

In the City of God, Augustine expresses how a person can have a properly ordered love for what is good. But this takes training in the affections. He writes, “For though it be good, it may be loved with an evil as well as with a good love: it is loved rightly when it is loved ordinately; evilly, when inordinately” (Augustine, City of God, XV.22). This leads, then to his classic statement, “It seems to me that it is a brief but true definition of virtue to say, it is the order of love (quod definitio brevis et vera virtutis ordo est amoris)” (Augustine, City of God, XV.22).

In his essay “Men without Chests,” C. S. Lewis builds his argument on Augustine’s dictum, “St. Augustine defines virtue as ordo amoris, the ordinate condition of the affections in which every object is accorded that kind of degree of love which is appropriate to it” (C. S. Lewis, The Abolition of Man, 16). The child must learn to regulate his or her affections based on an evaluation of objective value. The thesis of Lewis’s The Abolition of Man comes down to whether one views education in modernist terms (facts, figures, pure reason, critical analysis, etc.) or as a means to train children to have proper emotional responses to what is true, good and beautiful. Lewis writes:

“Hence the educational problem is wholly different according as you stand within or without the Tao. For those within, the task is to train in the pupil those responses which are in themselves appropriate, whether anyone is making them or not, and in making which the very nature of man consists. Those without, if they are logical, must regard all sentiments as equally non-rational, as mere mists between us and the real objects. As a result, they must either decide to remove all sentiments, as far as possible, from the pupil’s mind; or else to encourage some sentiments for reasons that have nothing to do with their intrinsic ‘justness’ or ‘ordinacy.’”

C. S. Lewis, The Abolition of Man, 20-21.

Now, Lewis uses the term Tao to indicate the most basic universal principles without recourse to theistic language. In doing this, he dispenses with a critique that his argument depends on Christian moral virtue. Instead, by looking to natural law, he is able to demonstrate that the affections are universal in nature and inherent in what it means to be human.

Children as Persons

The educational value of viewing children as whole person is tremendous. The Renaissance humanists reconsidered the purpose of education in light of their philosophical commitment to viewing children as having moral character and emotional capacity. The biblical view of children corroborates this insight. As educators today, we may need a renewal once again to understand the full capacity of every child to think, feel and believe.

Charlotte Mason understood this principle to be foundational when she writes:

“If we have not proved that a child is born a person with a mind as complete and as beautiful as his beautiful little body, we can at least show that he always has all the mind he requires for his occasions; that is, that his mind is the instrument of his education and that his education does not produce his mind.”

Charlotte Mason, Toward a Philosophy of Education, 36.

From the earliest ages, children show a capacity to learn. Consider how easily a child learns language, without any other help than to imitate the language users around them. Mason goes on to illustrate this point.

“Reason is present in the infant as truly as imagination. As soon as he can speak he lets us know that he has pondered the ’cause why’ of things and perplexes us with a thousand questions. His ‘why?’ is ceaseless. Nor are his reasonings always disinterested. How soon the little urchin learns to manage his nurse or mother, to calculate her moods and play upon her feelings! It is in him to be a little tyrant; “he has a will of his own,” says his nurse, but she is mistaken in supposing that his stormy manifestations of greed, wilfulness, temper, are signs of will. It is when the little boy is able to stop all these and restrain himself with quivering lip that his will comes into play; for he has a conscience too. Before he begins to toddle he knows the difference between right and wrong.”

Charlotte Mason, Toward a Philosophy of Education, 37.

Notice how many capacities are within the child: rationality, imagination, morality, conscience, emotions. All of these need to be trained for the person to grow, but the educational point is that training the child does not instill these. Instead, these capacities are already in the child. Our educational renewal movement has the opportunity to bring forward a renewed vision of the child as a whole person, to enact a Renaissance of education in our day.

Training the Prophetic Voice by Dr. Patrick Egan is a must-read for classical Christian educators seeking to build a robust rhetoric program. Grounded in biblical theology, this insightful book provides a framework for developing students’ prophetic voices – the ability to speak with wisdom, clarity, and conviction on the issues that matter most.

As an experienced educator, Dr. Egan understands the vital role rhetoric plays in shaping the next generation of Christian leaders. Through time-tested principles and practical guidance, he equips teachers to cultivate students who can articulate the truth with passion and purpose.

Whether you’re looking to revitalize your existing rhetoric curriculum or lay the foundation for a new program, Training the Prophetic Voice is an invaluable resource. Discover how to empower your students to become effective communicators, courageous truth-tellers, and agents of transformation in their communities and beyond.

Order your copy of Training the Prophetic Voice today and unlock the power of your students’ voice in your classroom.

The post Renaissance Children: How Our View of Children Shapes Our Educational Aims appeared first on .

Dorothy Sayers, known for her essay The Lost Tools of Learning (1947), advocated for a return to liberal arts education. With a special emphasis on the language arts of the Trivium, Sayers believed that the best remedy against sensationalistic news headlines was to equip the intellect with the right tools. Sayers writes,

For we let our young men and women go out unarmed, in a day when armour was never so necessary. By teaching them all to read, we have left them at the mercy of the printed word. By the invention of the film and the radio, we have made certain that no aversion to reading shall secure them from the incessant battery of words, words, words. They do not know what the words mean; they do not know how to ward them off or blunt their edge or fling them back; they are a prey to words in their emotions instead of being the masters of them in their intellects.

It took a few decades, but her essay struck a nerve. Today there are hundreds of classical liberal arts schools across the United States, and indeed, the world, who look to this essay as their source of inspiration. Through equipping students with the tools of grammar, logic, and rhetoric, students are trained how to learn independently, master words, and discern truth from falsehood for themselves.

C.S. Lewis, a friend of Sayers, offered different, but related, advice. In The Abolition of Man (1943), Lewis argues that the best defense against propaganda that preys upon our unguarded emotions is a good offense: trained affections (what we desire). Emotions and affections themselves are alogical (not illogical) and not the issue. The problem occurs when our desires, and emotions that accompany them, are untrained and left unprepared to respond to bad ideas. The solution for Lewis, therefore, is not to suppress our subjective responses, but to shape them properly. Lewis writes, “The task of the modern educator is not to cut down jungles but to irrigate deserts” (14). 

In this blog article, I will explore how Christian educators can preserve a holistic view of the human person, including emotions, while not falling prey to emotionalism. To do so, we need to avoid subjectivism on the one hand and disembodied rationalism on the other. The way forward is to train students’ affections and emotions to be in accordance with objective values embedded in reality.

An “Innocent” Grammar Textbook

In The Abolition of Man, Lewis’ thesis is that the key to saving the humanity of human beings in the modern world is to preserve the idea that a connection exists between subjective responses and objective values. That is, existence is not a moral free-for-all regarding what to believe and love, or how to live. Rather, there is an underlying moral fabric of the universe that humans must learn how to properly live within. 

To make his case, Lewis shows how subjectivism, the idea that there are no objective moral values, is already creeping into the broader western intellectual mainstream. Using The Green Book, a pseudonym for The Control of Language (1939), as an example, Lewis points out that the authors smuggle in language of subjectivity in their supposedly innocent treatment of adjectives. How so?

In this now-famous passage for Lewisian readers, the authors, whom Lewis pseudo-names Gaius and Titius, recall an episode from the life of Coleridge in which he and a fellow tourist visit a waterfall. As they behold the majesty of the falls, they are struck with awe. Coleridge deems the falls “sublime,” while his fellow tourist calls them “pretty,” to Coleridge’s chagrin. 

Gaius and Titius take this opportunity to correct Coleridge for his judgment of the fellow tourist. Coleridge, they write, has no reason to look down upon the poor word choice, because both descriptions are mere projections of subjective emotion. These value statements have no purchase on reality. It is not as if the waterfall actually contains a quality that merits a particular response. To be sure, if the tourist described the water as purple or if Coleridge claimed the falls were composed of salt water, this would be a problem. But for Gaius and Titius, the value statements such as “sublime,” “pretty,” or even “ugly,” cannot be aesthetically evaluated objectively because there is nothing aesthetically objective about the waterfall, or anything for that matter, to evaluate.

Attack on Metaphysics

The authors of The Green Book, it could be said, were merely drinking from the subjective water fountain of the academic waterline in 20th century Europe. In After Humanity: A Guide to C.S. Lewis’s The Abolition of Man (2021), Michael Ward identifies two key figures who were influencing this subjectivism.

The first figure is philosopher A.J. Ayer, a leading figure for logical positivism. Logical positivism is the idea that meaningful propositions are only those that are either tautological (e.g. “All bachelors are unmarried”) or empirically verifiable. In this view, moral and aesthetic judgments are mere expressions of emotion (6). There are no inherent qualities such as “good” or “beautiful” in objects of the universe. All that exists is the world of our five senses. Language is meaningful insofar as it describes the natural world or communicates incorrigible logical truths. The conclusion is that value statements are mere projections of individuals and therefore are data for the social sciences. Ayer writes, “It appears, then, that ethics, as a branch of knowledge, is nothing more than a department of psychology and sociology” (“A Critique of Ethics” (1952) in Ethical Theory: An Anthology (2007), edited by Russ Shafer-Landau).

The second figure is I.A. Richards, an interdisciplinary scholar well-known for his work on subjectivism. Subjectivism, like logical positivism, holds that there are no objective moral or aesthetic values. Value statements merely reflect the internal feelings of the subject. They cannot and do not correlate to objective qualities in external objects (7). Ward writes, “He (Richards) makes the same subjectivist moves in the field of aesthetics as Ayer does in the realm of ethics. The beauty of art, just like the wrongness of theft, is an interior feeling only, a personal experience in the mind of an onlooker, not the external reality that merits a certain response” (8). 

With these philosophical ideas in circulation, you can see why Lewis is concerned. It is one thing for these ideas to gain traction in the ivory towers of academia. It is another thing for these ideas to be smuggled into grammar textbooks for the general public. Through the innocent teaching of grammar, a whole generation could grow up indoctrinated to believe in the nonexistence of objective values.

With World War II raging on around Lewis, Ward captures the Oxford professor’s fear well:

Had human civilization run its course? With entire sections of the population in mainland Europe being systematically exterminated, with food scarce and death falling out of the sky, no one could avoid wondering what had led humanity to such a pass or whether it would ever regain its equilibrium. And did it even deserve to? Did the word deserve itself still mean anything? The status of desert, of objective realities meriting certain responses, had become an inescapably pressing matter of concern politically no less than ethically and aesthetically. Modernity was producing barbarism, but did it really matter? (9)

To deny a world of objective value is to deny any possibility of proper action in the world, including our emotional responses. It is to release humans to the whims of instinct, the spontaneous urges of desire, and ultimately, slavery to our base appetites. In this world, there is no moral ecology, no basis for distinguishing virtue from vice and good from evil. All that is left is a Nietzschean battle for the will to power. Lewis dedicates the remainder of The Abolition of Man to further diagnose this grave issue and issue humanity’s final prognosis. Spoiler: It is not “pretty.”

A Good Offense is the Best Defense

The solution Lewis prescribes is not to excise emotion from the human experience, but to shape our affections, and the emotions that accompany them, properly. This is the antidote to both bad philosophical ideas, like subjectivism, and practical everyday challenges like sensationalistic news media or propaganda. Interestingly, the The Green Book authors offered their own solution to propaganda in their day: use exclusively empirical arguments to critique faulty, sensationalistic arguments, thereby leading to the deflation of the emotional force.

Lewis, however, proposes a different way that takes into consideration the emotive and affective aspects of what it means to be human. He writes,

They (Gaius and Titius) see the world around them swayed by emotional propaganda–they have learned from tradition that youth is sentimental–and they conclude that the best thing they can do is to fortify the minds of young people against emotion. My experience as a teacher tells an opposite tale. 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. (14).

In other words, the best defense is a good offense. To train against sensationalistic propaganda, full of goodness and beauty fakes, expose children to examples of real beauty and goodness, through rich literature (6). The solution, therefore, is not to dispel with emotion or desire altogether, but to train it according to moral and aesthetic values, holding logic, emotion, and beauty together. An empirical solution alone produces “trousered apes,” as Lewis puts it, not full-orbed humans.

The call to shape our affections and train our emotions, of course, assumes there is objective value in the world to which we must respond. Going back to the waterfall example, the reason Coleridge was disgusted by the word “pretty” was because he believed the waterfall merited more than the meaning that word could conjure (15). In other words, the term did not align with the objective beauty of the waterfall. Later Lewis writes that emotions are alogical (not logical or illogical) in and of themselves… “But they can be reasonable or unreasonable as they conform to Reason or fail to conform. The heart never takes the place of the head: but it can, and should, obey it” (19). Students need to be exposed to numerous examples of honor, courage, self-sacrifice, and beauty. As they do, their emotions and affections will overtime align with reason.

The Important of Musical Education

In The Liberal Arts Tradition (3rd edition 2021), authors Kevin Clark and Ravi Jain sketch out what this training might look like. In their paradigm for understanding classical education, they point out that the liberal arts tradition of education is more than a program for the mind. Indeed, the tradition reflects a holistic understanding of what it means to be human as a complex unity of mind, heart, body, and soul. 

One key insight from the book is that before the liberal arts can be properly studied, students should be trained in a precritical fashion, called musical education. The authors write, ” The musical and gymnastic education fitted the students’ hearts and bodies to reality. The training of the body and the tuning of the heart to love what is lovely helped nurture the virtues of courage and temperance (bodily restraint)” (6). In other words, through telling stories, reciting poetry, and beholding beauty in nature and art, students are oriented toward objective values even before they can analyze these subjects critically with the liberal arts.

Conclusion: Read and Practice

If you are a regular follower of Educational Renaissance, you will not be surprised that I am going to close by emphasizing the importance of reading the classics and cultivating good habits. Lewis writes, “Without the aid of trained emotions, the intellect is powerless against the animal organism” (24). How do we train affections and emotions in accordance with what is true, good, and beautiful? Let me suggest two general ways:

First, we can shape the moral imagination of students through reading, listening, narrating, and delighting in all that is good, true, and beautiful. As children hear stories of heroism, compassion, courage, perseverance, and honesty, they will begin to recognize these virtues as good and worthy of imitation. As they delight in God’s beautiful creation, behold a dazzling seascape, or enjoy an inspiring musical score, they will begin to develop a desire and appreciation for the beauty around them.

Second, we can help students gain experience in a life of virtue through practicing good habits. The repetition of acts of service, kindness, honesty, and other habits will shape their hearts and minds in a truly formative way. As teachers cast vision for students of a life led by the Holy Spirit, and support them encouragingly on a daily basis, students undergo the sort of moral formation that will lead them to be well-rounded humans, trained with affections and emotions informed by reason, and prepared to thrive in God’s created moral order.

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Life comes at us at a furious tempo enhanced by these new technologies. Which leads me to the news. The news is no longer arriving on our doorstep in print form and in our living rooms through three broadcast channels. The news shows up as headlines on our phone’s widget, in our RSS readers, in our social media feeds, not to mention the 24/7 news cycles of multiple broadcast channels. The transformation of the news from the domain of a few professional journalism outlets to the multivarious avenues of delivery today has made a lasting impact on our society, our culture and even our individual psyches. The multiplication of news has not made us a more informed populace. Instead, the phrase “fake news” emerged revealing a deep mistrust in all stripes of news media. In this article I would like to explore a few perspectives that will hopefully enable us to train our students to withstand the onslaught of contemporary news, which I believe has exacerbated the difficult landscape of the post-iPhone era.

The Example of C. S. Lewis

It behooves us to consider the sage advice of C. S. Lewis: read old books. This advice really speaks into our educational renewal movement. It is not that the old books distract us from the present. We are not burying our heads in the sands of days gone by while the world around us burns. No, instead we are gaining valuable perspective. The books that have stood the test of time contain insights that transcend the particulars of any given timeframe. It was said that when Lewis was introduced to a newsworthy event, despite the fact that he didn’t read the news, he had incisive thoughts about current events. This was because his reading of old books informed his thinking so that he could address the pressing concerns of his day from a well-considered perspective. Now, to be fair, Lewis did from time-to-time read the news. It is inevitable that one takes a glance at items of present-day concern. But his regular practice was to ignore the news in preference to literary and philosophical writings.

I remember reading Lewis’s Surprised by Joy and later Alan Jacob’s The Narnian while working on my PhD. At the time I had numerous news sources dumping headlines into my RSS feed. It struck me that Lewis’s habit of ignoring the news might be a way for me to clear out both the time and the headspace to make significant progress on my research and writing. Even though I wouldn’t be up on the latest events when conversing with my colleagues over lunch, it was a sacrifice I was willing to make. Here is the quote that got me started on my journey of giving up on the news, from Surprised by Joy:

Even in peacetime I think those are very wrong who say that schoolboys should be encouraged to read the newspapers. Nearly all that a boy reads there in his teens will be seen before he is twenty to have been false in emphasis and interpretation, if not in fact as well, and most of it will have lost all importance. Most of what he remembers he will therefore have to unlearn; and he will probably have acquired an incurable taste for vulgarity and sensationalism and the fatal habit of fluttering from paragraph to paragraph to learn how an actress has been divorced in California, a train derailed in France, and quadruplets born in New Zealand.

C. S. Lewis, Surprised by Joy (Harcourt, 1955), 159

Some of the key words and phrases that should jump out when reading this passage are “false,” “lost all importance,” “have to unlearn,” “vulgarity,” “sensationalism,” and “habit of fluttering.” This was Lewis in 1955, a decade after World War 2. Consider how much more these words and phrases offer a critique of our social media feeds. We swipe our finger on the iPhone scrolling for that which is sensational, probably vulgar, most likely false but above all is unimportant. As we try to make sense of our world, it turns out the news is one of the worst ways to gauge the way things really are.

The impact on our neurology has far-reaching consequences that we have yet to fully realize. In The Shallows, Nicholas Carr spells out how the internet impacts both our conscious and unconscious thinking as well as rewires our neurological networks. He writes:

The Net’s cacophony of stimuli short-circuits both conscious and unconscious thought, preventing our minds from thinking either deeply or creatively. Our brains turn into simple signal-processing units, quickly shepherding information into consciousness and then back out again.

Nicholas Carr, The Shallows (New York: Norton), 119

As we attempt to interact with our environment to understand the way things really are, the internet prevents us from the kind of deep reflection that would ultimately help us make sense of the world.

News in the Ancient World

If Lewis started me on my journey toward a news-free life, it was my research into the transmission of information in the ancient world that really caught ahold of me. In a world where most people could not read or write, oral communication was the means by which people learned about current events. News as we know it today was issued in the form of public edicts. Official policy was disseminated by written decrees conveyed to public areas such as city marketplaces to be read by town criers. Parchments might be publicly displayed for those who were not present to hear the announced edict. Important and permanent statutes might be displayed as placards or pillars that served public notice of rules and regulations. (see Alan Millard, Reading and Writing in the Time of Jesus, 166-168) The written word was essentially reserved for legal proceedings and official business. Note how edicts were read aloud publicly, since most people were unable to read.

In an oral culture, that which was truly newsworthy spread by word of mouth. At its worst, oral culture perpetuates gossip and misinformation. Yet, the expectation was that rules and regulations announced in the public square would utilize the rapid transmission word-of-mouth communication provided. A Roman authority could dispatch a minimal number of emissaries to strategic locations and know that the message would reach a majority of the populace. The edict read in the marketplace was soon spoken of along the highways and byways of a far-flung empire. Consider the example of the decree that went out from Caesar Augustus in Luke 2:1. Joseph of Nazareth didn’t read about this in a newspaper, it was likely disseminated first from a written edict read aloud in a major city and then spread via word-of-mouth, with the effect that most of the population abided by the regulation to be registered.

Now the point of all of this is that for the majority of history, most of the news that individuals received was learned through relationships, either business (i.e. trips to the marketplace), kinship, or community. The reception of newsworthy information through relationship means you could assess the relative reliability of your sources. If your uncle is a trustworthy, upright citizen, then when he tells you about something, you are inclined to believe it. The other fascinating insight provided by the concept that newsworthy items were received through close relationships is that the “news” was likely to be highly relevant to your daily life. Much of the click-bait types of news about citizens of Rome that would have scintillated the ears of remote Galileans would have been so irrelevant to daily life that it never would have been communicated. So in general the oral-dominant culture of the ancient world actually provided two major filters for newsworthiness: 1) source reliability, and 2) relevance to daily life.

Neil Postman 2.0

In 1985 when Neil Postman published Amusing Ourselves to Death, the cultural artifact that most dominated public discourse was the television. Breaking down that word – tele-vision – provides two developments that can be traced over time. The first part “tele” can be traced back to the telegraph, which was the first technology that Postman shows transformed our culture from a typographical culture to an illuminated screen culture. He writes:

“The telegraph introduced a kind of public conversation whose form had startling characteristics: Its language was the language of headlines – sensational, fragmented, impersonal. News took the form of slogans, to be noted with excitement, to be forgotten with dispatch. Its language was also entirely discontinuous. One message had no connection to that which preceded or followed it. Each ‘headline’ stood alone as its own context. The receiver of the news had to provide a meaning if he could. The sender was under no obligation to do so.”

Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death (Penguin), 70

Notice the shift from reliability and relevance to irresponsible and irrelevant. No longer did news have to provide the context necessary to make meaning of life or to enable the reader to take action.

“But the situation created by telegraphy, and then exacerbated by later technologies, made the relationship between information and action both abstract and remote.”

Amusing Ourselves to Death, 68

The prefix “tele” means far away. So, “television” means literally “far away vision.” News conducted to us from remote locations requires significant mental work in order to make sense of the context, background and meaning of the information. And yet, the nature of news items is to disseminate information so rapidly, that meaning making cannot happen. This leads to our inability to act on the information we receive through “far away vision.” If something happen in remote Hungary, there’s very little I can do about it. I just have to receive it at an abstract factoid.

“This ensemble of electronic techniques called into being a new world – a peek-a-boo world, where now this event, now that, pops into view for a moment, then vanishes again. It is a world without much coherence or sense; a world that does not ask us, indeed does not permit us to do anything; a world that is, like the child’s game of peek-a-boo, entirely self-contained. But like peek-a-boo, it is also endlessly entertaining.”

Amusing Ourselves to Death, 77

I am reminded of the famous scene in the 2000 film Gladiator where Russell Crowe’s character, Maximus, cries out in the coliseum, “Are you not entertained?” This is perhaps the new, highest value in society. Our pursuit is no longer for happiness, but for entertaining. Have we accepted a cheap substitute for eudaimonia?

“Television, in other words, is transforming our culture into one vast arena for show business. It is entirely possible, of course, that in the end we shall find that delightful, and decide we like it just fine. That is exactly what Aldous Huxley feared was coming, fifty years ago.”

Amusing Ourselves to Death, 80

That was 1985. We are now approaching forty years since Postman wrote this, and therefore almost a century since Huxley wrote Brave New World. Imagine what Postman would have to say about the internet, social media and the smartphone. If a thirty-minute nightly news program on, say, NBC is sensational, fragmented, and impersonal, how much more has our social media feed contributed to this Huxleyan dystopia? The technologies have changed (although they are still “tele-vision”), but Postman’s insight remains just as true today. The internet is really just tele-vision 2.0, so we need all the more Neil Postman 2.0.

Reading Old Books

So how do we lead a resistance to this Huxleyan dystopia? To answer this I return to C. S. Lewis and his advice to read old books. This sage advice comes from an introduction her wrote for an edition of On the Incarnation by Athanasius.

“Every age has its own outlook. It is specially good at seeing certain truths and specially liable to make certain mistakes. We all, therefore, need the books that will correct the characteristic mistakes of our own period.”

With renewed purpose this year, I believe our educational renewal movement has the tools to equip our students with wisdom and knowledge to cut through the click bait headlines of our social media feeds. If nothing else, classical Christian education is about old books. What we mean by old books is the classics, the great books. These have been tried and tested. People come back to them generation after generation finding in them a rich vein of insight, meaning and perspective. Consider this definition of a classic book by Charles Augustin Sainte-Beuve:

“A true classic, as I should like to hear it defined, is an author who has enriched the human mind, increased its treasure, and caused it to advance a step; who has discovered some moral and not equivocal truth, or revealed some eternal passion in that heart where all seemed known and discovered; who has expressed his thought, observation, or invention, in no matter what form, only provided it be broad and great, refined and sensible, sane and beautiful in itself; who has spoken to all in his own peculiar style, a style which is found to be also that of the whole world, a style new without neologism, new and old, easily contemporary with all time.”

Charles Augustin Sainte-Beuve, “What is a Classic?” Harvard Classics, Vol. 32: Literary and Philosophical Essays

Compare this definition to what we find in the news. As classical educators, we have the opportunity to provide the antidote to a sensational, fragmented and impersonal media. What is the great book you will be sharing with your students? What treasure will enrich their minds and yours? When you open that cherished volume, enable them to see the truth, beauty and goodness therein. For from it they will gain so much perspective as to make the news pale in comparison.

One final word. When I previously taught senior history covering the modern world, I had my students read Amusing Ourselves to Death. I found that it provided a sound critique of culture from the World Wars to the present. If you haven’t adopted this work in your high school, it is well worth a look. The first time I worked through it with students, the Hunger Games movies were still fairly recent. They easily made the connections between the dystopian world Suzanne Collins created and the arguments Postman puts forward. At the conclusion of our reading of Amusing Ourselves to Death, I challenged my students to undertake a screen fast. Most of my students had jobs and drove themselves everywhere, so they had to plan ahead to be without phone, tablet, laptop or TV. For instance, I had one student who provided her mom’s number in case of emergencies. The challenge was to go 72 hours without any screen time. Upon completion of the challenge, the student then wrote a reflection on their experience. Some consistent patterns emerged. These students spent more time with family, spent more time outdoors, engaged in more leisure activities, got more sleep, exercised more, and overall felt a greater sense of wellbeing as a result of their screen fast. I even had one student who mentioned she noticed how much the birds sing. If you work with high school or college students, I highly recommend both Postman’s book as well as the screen fast challenge. They can really open the eyes of your students and empower them to enact real change in their lives.

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I am reading it aloud with my son this summer. I was struck on this reading (perhaps my fourth or fifth time through the series) by the critique Lewis levels on modern education in the opening chapter. As many may already know, Lewis spells out his philosophy of education in his series of lectures contained in The Abolition of Man. We’ll touch on that in a moment. But the interesting feature of the narrative is that one is able to see the failings of the educational system in 1950s Britain through a literary lens in more immediate ways than can be conveyed in a lengthier philosophical treatment. Let’s recount what occurs in the first chapter of The Silver Chair.

Why is Jill Crying?: The Darkness of Valueless Education

We are first introduced to Jill Pole as the girl crying behind the gym on “a dull autumn day.” We will immediately be told why she is crying, so I want to point out the use of the adjective “dull” here. It is often the case that weather reflects the mood of the characters. In this case, the word “dull” although depicting a particularly common autumnal day in England also plays a potential double service in framing the educational critique about to unfold. The weather is as dull as the school we will soon learn about.

So why is Jill crying?

“She was crying because they had been bullying her. This is not going to be a school story, so I shall say as little as possible about Jill’s school, which is not a pleasant subject. It was ‘Co-educational,’ a school for both boys and girls, what used to be called a ‘mixed’ school; some said it was not nearly so mixed as the minds of the people who ran it.”

C. S. Lewis, The Silver Chair, 1

Notice again the word play, this time made more explicit as Lewis repeats the word “mixed” with two different senses. Jill had been bullied. We might think this is the result of the mixing of boys and girls: girls being the natural prey of the aggression of boys. But it soon unfolds that boys like Eustace are likewise bullied and girls like Edith Jackle can dish it out just like the boys. No, bullying is merely a presenting symptom of a deeper issue at Experiment House (the name of the school Jill and Eustace attend). Lewis places the blame on the leaders of Experiment House:

“These people had the idea that boys and girls should be allowed to do what they liked. And unfortunately what ten or fifteen of the biggest boys and girls liked best was bullying the others. All sorts of things, horrid things, went on which at an ordinary school would have been found out and stopped in half a term; but at this school they weren’t. Or even if they were, the people who did them were not expelled or punished. The Head said they were interesting psychological cases and sent for them and talked to them for hours. And if you knew the right sort of things to say to the Head, the main result was that you became rather a favourite than otherwise.”

C. S. Lewis, The Silver Chair, 1-2

Lewis here depicts a child-centered school environment where the leadership is more interested in experimental psychology than in training students to learn and think. Our author perhaps exaggerates to create a humorous opening scene, but there is much that rings true in the farce.

Throughout the rest of the chapter, we gain further insights into Experiment House. It is a school where “Bibles were not encouraged” (p. 5). It was a place of “hopelessness” (p. 6). And the expected outcomes at such a school are dire indeed.

“Owing to the curious methods of teaching at Experiment House, one did not learn much French or Maths or Latin or things of that sort; but one did learn a lot about getting away quickly and quietly when They were looking for one.”

C. S. Lewis, The Silver Chair, 8

Experiment House was less a place where children desired to learn, but a place where children desired to escape. Together Jill and Eustace escape to Narnia by way of a door in the high stone wall which was usually locked to keep the children from getting out.

Lewis’s Critique of Modern Education: The Loss of Values in Education

Underlying the cynical depiction of Experiment House is the profound concern Lewis has that modern education has jettisoned traditional values. Undue focus is given to scientism and technicism. I appreciated when Jason wrote on these two ideas, perhaps even coining a term or two. What these ideas capture is that science and technology aren’t the problem. Instead, it is something like the undiscerning application and the unpracticed practitioners applying new methods with the ring of science who have thrown out the baby, the bathwater and the tub as well. That is to say, modern education has sought to rid itself of the great books, the values that are embedded in them and the methods by which we might acquire knowledge of objective value.

Lewis expressed his philosophical critique of modern education in The Abolition of Man, the 1943 publication of a series of lectures on education delivered at King’s College, Newcastle. This was a good ten years before publishing in narrative form his cynical depiction of Experiment House in The Silver Chair. Central to his argument against modern education’s penchant for abolishing traditional values is what he calls the doctrine of objective value. This is “the belief that certain attitudes are really true, and other really false, to the kind of things the universe is and the kind of things we are.” To put this another way, if something exists in reality, there is a real, objective value associated with it. When we see a natural vista, say the Grand Canyon at sunset, the beauty of this vista is inherent in what it is we see. It is good and right for us to call it beautiful or sublime or majestic. So the doctrine of objective value would say that the kind of thing the Grand Canyon is calls forth such predicate adjectives as beautiful, sublime or majestic. Furthermore, because we are the kinds of creatures that we are, it is inherent in our natures to have an emotional response to the Grand Canyon that calls forth from us phrases like, “This is majestic.”

To make his point, Lewis takes to task the authors of The Green Book, hiding the true identity of the authors by way of pseudonymns. (The actual book in question is The Control of Language: A Critical Approach to Reading and Writing, by Alex King and Martin Ketley published in 1939.) Lewis identifies how the authors are suspicious that “all predicates of value” (16) are based on emotions. Better to excise such frivolous use of language as children would then be made susceptible to propaganda. Such is the advice given in The Green Book. Lewis sees how this may at first glance be an appropriate exercise for the mind, but it leaves the heart untrained. Such an education produces what Lewis calls the trousered ape and the urban blockhead. The viewpoint of the authors of The Green Book “hold that the ordinary human feelings about the past or animals or large waterfalls are contrary to reason and contemptible and ought to be eradicated” (The Abolition of Man 22-23).

The dystopian society produced by educating boys and girls without proper training in the affections gives us individuals not only skeptical about value statement, but equally skeptical about ethics. Can we then trust that our neighbor won’t cheat? Can we expect the soldier not to abandon his post? We are left with a kind of brutish form of humanity (the trousered ape) or an uncaring intellectual (the urban blockhead). Experiment House in The Silver Chair exemplifies this with bullying becoming the singular factor for moving up the dominance hierarchy as a student. The leaders of the school view this with the kind of uncaring detachment of a lab technician.

The alternative to this is spelled out by Lewis in a brief review of such figures as Augustine, Aristotle and Plato. All three saw the goal of education as the formation of individuals whose emotions or affections were properly ordered according to the doctrine of objective value.

St. Augustine defines virtue as ordo amoris, the ordinate condition of the affections in which every object is accorded that kind and degree of love which is appropriate to it. (26, referring to City of God book 15, chapter 22).

C. S. Lewis, The Abolition of Man, 26, referring to City of God book 15, chapter 22

Here we see that the human must be trained to match one’s love to the object of affection. There are things in this world worthy of love and things in this world that are distasteful. Learning to distinguish and differentiate, to properly apply language appropriate to our response to things is one of the highest goals of education.

Aristotle says that the aim of education is to make the pupil like and dislike what he ought.

C. S. Lewis, The Abolition of Man, 26, referring to Nichomachean Ethics 1104b

The ordering of affections according to Augustine pursues the educational aims articulated by Aristotle. This is why we place before students great works of literature, art and music. We are also presenting to them great events from history or paying close attention to the world of nature around us. It is not only the great works, but likewise those worthy of disapproval.

In the Republic, the well-nurtured youth is one ‘who would see most clearly whatever was amiss in ill-made works of man or ill-grown works of nature, and with a just distaste would blame and hate the ugly even from his earliest years and would give delighted praise to beauty, receiving it into his soul and being nourished by it, so that he becomes a man of gentle heart. All this before he is of an age to reason; so that when Reason at length comes to him, then, bred as he has been, he will hold out his hands in welcome and recognize her because of the affinity he bears to her.’

C. S. Lewis, The Abolition of Man, 27, referring to Republic 402a

Plato’s educational schema has us training the heart before training the head. Distaste and delight when properly learned lead the way for reason to be well situated in the person. The malnourished souls of teachers and pupils alike at Experiment House make it a barren place, distinctly contrasted with Jill and Eustace discover once the locked door on the grounds of Experiment House are jarred open.

They had expected to see the grey, heathery slope of the moor going up and up to join the dull autumn sky. Instead, a blaze of sunshine met them. It poured through the doorway as the light of a June day pours into a garage when you open the door. It made the drops of water on the grass glitter like beads and showed up the dirtiness of Jill’s tear-stained face. And the sunlight was coming from what certainly did look like a different world—what they could see of it. They saw smooth turf, smoother and brighter than Jill had ever seen before, and blue sky, and, darting to and fro, things so bright that they might have been jewels or huge butterflies.

C. S. Lewis, The Silver Chair, 9

Both Heart and Mind: The Renewal of Values in Education

Schools have perennially been easy prey for social critiques. We can find many instances within generations of British literature ranging from Shakespeare and Milton to Austen and Dickens. This is because the effort to learn is distasteful when divorced from our natural curiosity and because education divorced from values is bland and lifeless.

The British schooling tradition is in many ways the classical model we have inherited in our educational renewal movement. Oxford and Cambridge became the standard model for liberal arts universities coming out of the Middle Ages. Every generation struggles to reform and renew education in part because we can never fully get it right. This is actually the strength of the classical tradition. It holds within it all the tools required to solve the problems and challenges that come from the classical tradition.

The power of Lewis’s critique holds all the more true in light of the expansion of technological power and the continued erosion of values in society. If Lewis was concerned about Men without Chests, perhaps we are facing Men with Mechanical Chests. Throwing more money and technology at an educational system that has divorced itself from values will only exacerbate our current dystopia. Just as Jill and Eustace glimpsed Narnia after breaking through the locked door, perhaps we can glimpse the green pastures of the renewal of values in education.

Once Jill and Eustace entered the world of Aslan they find themselves on the precipice of an enormous cliff overlooking the land of Narnia. Eustace falls over the cliff, but is saved by the breath of Aslan. Jill remains on the heights, seeing Aslan for the first time. There she is told four Signs that must be remembered that will guide them on their quest. Aslan instructs her to repeat the four Signs (and I would be remiss not to point out that even Aslan uses narration). Her mission is not only to remember and fulfill these Signs, but she must also convey them to Eustace. Their ultimate goal is to rescue Prince Rilian from the clutches of the Emerald Witch. If we have properly put on our mythological thinking caps, it is clear that Jill and Eustace must rescue social order in the form of the young prince from the embodiment of malicious chaos.

So we see how the renewal of society occurs at the instruction of Aslan. The Signs given to Jill are basic instructions. They are functionally like the Ten Commandments, even though they are not laws, so to speak. But within the narrative they provide direction not only to the advancement of the plot, but they serve to motivate the wills of our two protagonists. In this way we can see that Aslan’s instructions are not just esoteric, intellectual knowledge. This is more like practical wisdom, rules the children can live by as they fulfill their quest. As they abide by these rules, they are corrected when they go astray and confirmed when they go aright. This is what we would expect of wisdom and knowledge leading to the renewal of society.

It would be all too easy to stretch the elements of the story too far. However, I think Lewis demonstrates in the narrative of The Silver Chair the point he makes theoretically in The Abolition of Man. When we are guided by objective values, society will have men and women capable of bearing the responsibility to renew society. When we jettison objective values, our men and women will be incapacitated, leading to the demise of society. And so with this in mind, as we anticipate the renewal of the school year, let us be mindful of objective values. Let us ponder anew the virtues – both cardinal and theological – that are guiding lights for our students. May we train them up in their affections so that they know to like and dislike what they ought and to accord to every object that kind and degree of love which is appropriate to it.

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