Markos, Louis. C.S. Lewis: An Apologist for Education. Camp Hill, Classical Academic Press, 2015.
For many classical educators, C.S. Lewis stands out as a favorite author and mentor. Whether it be his academic works like The Abolition of Man or his fiction and Christian apologetics like the Chronicles of Narnia and Mere Christianity, Lewis’ writing effectively baptizes the imagination of his readers, converting them to a love of old books, fairy tales, and the importance of great ideas.
However, reading Lewis also leaves classical educators wishing he had written more directly about education. “If only he had done for education what he did for Christianity,” some may think to themselves, “giving us Mere Education to clarify the essence of classical education and unify our pedagogical sects.” In Lewis’ defense, he did address many educational issues in his books and essays, but the effect was somewhat scattered, piecemeal, and finally inadequate to turn the tide of mass progressive education in the 20th century. But with the resurgence of classical education, scholars have worked to assemble Lewis’ thoughts on education and distill his guiding principles of a classical education’s curriculum and pedagogy for our modern moment.
One such scholar is Dr. Louis Markos, professor English at Houston Baptist University. In his book C.S. Lewis: An Apologist for Education published by Classical Academic Press, Markos provides a short biography of Lewis’s education, summarizes his philosophy of education, and then offers ideas on how modern educators could apply Lewis’ principles of education at their schools. This short but substantial book is one every classical educator would benefit from reading.
C.S. Lewis’ Educational Biography
Markos begins with Lewis’ educational journey from boarding school, to private tutor, and eventually to Oxford. Born in Belfast, Ireland, Lewis “led a happy childhood filled with an overabundance of books and a rich imagination.” But the joy of childhood was curtailed with the sickness and death of Lewis’ mother from cancer, after which he was sent to a series of boarding schools. He despised this time of his life, feeling like “the schools taught him very little, and he particularly hated the overfocus on athletics and the vanity it produced in the upper-class athletes.”
Lewis eventually convinced his father how terrible his boarding school experience was, and was sent to study under a personal tutor, William T. Kirkpatrick. Under the tutelage of “the Great Knock,” a Socrates-like figure who knocked all “sloppy, emotional, and inexact thinking” out of Lewis with his merciless questions, Lewis underwent an intellectual boot camp to prepare him for Oxford. Studying logic, ancient languages, and literature, Lewis “learned to define terms, to weigh evidence and to master the rules of grammar, logic, and rhetoric.” He also “grew into a ferocious debater and insisted that all conclusions be traced back to their foundational assumptions and presuppositions.”
Lewis’ studies were interrupted by the outbreak of World War I. After serving briefly in trenches, where he was injured by a British artillery shell that misfired, he applied and was admitted to Oxford where he proved himself a “student of prodigious ability.” He “won firsts (first-class honors) in all three of his subjects: ancient languages and literature, English literature, and philosophy,” which secured him a job as a tutor at Magdalen College, Oxford. While primarily a professor of medieval literature, Lewis “took in the full range of literature, history, philosophy, and literary theory from Homer to the Victorians.” As such he acquired a “depth and breadth of knowledge that made him one of the most accomplished generalists (‘renaissance men’) of his day.”
C.S. Lewis’ Philosophy of Education
However, learning and teaching was not just a career or abstract intellectual pursuit, but a way of life that informed how and why he lived. As Markos explains, “Although Lewis loved his job, it was never simply a game for him. The reading and teaching of literature was serious business: properly executed it should lead to changed hearts and lives.”
First and foremost in his educational philosophy was Lewis’s commitment to a “classical system of education that was grounded both in ancient languages and in a close reading of canonical texts.” He had no patience for the “chronological snobbery” of readers who dismissed old books, customs, and ideas because they were not up-to-date with the scientific or politically correct consensus. Instead of forcing “the past to accommodate itself to our beliefs and agendas,” we should “try to see our own life and times through the eyes of the past” and be “ever ready to learn at the feet of the tradition.”
Another important feature of Lewis’ educational philosophy was that a “truly democratic education—one which will preserve democracy—must be, in its own field, ruthlessly aristocratic, shamelessly ‘high brow.’” Lewis was a strong critic of the egalitarian view of democratic education that abolished excellence in an effort to make outcomes equitable, for at the crux of such an education system lies the vice of envy. If envy becomes the primary motivating sentiment in education, all standards of excellence are torn down and replaced with a “lowest-common-denominator atmosphere fueled by a spirit that Lewis dubs ‘I’m as good as you.’”
Instead of an education of envy, Lewis advocated for an education predicated on properly trained sentiments that glories in the goods, truths, and beauties that transcend us, but which we can nonetheless recognize and aim towards. In his book The Abolition of Man, Lewis argued that a humane education is one that develops the chest, that is the poetic location of our moral compass described in terms of feeling or sentiment. And that an education that divorces the intellectual life of the mind from the moral reckoning of the chest will abolish our humanity. We cannot, as Lewis aptly put it, “make men without chests and expect of them virtue and enterprise” any more than we can “castrate and bid the gelding be fruitful.” Rather, we should develop the whole man, his intellect and his moral character; otherwise, his base passions will rule over him.
What Educators Can Learn from C.S. Lewis
While a careful reader might find many more principles related to education in Lewis’ work, Markos lays out five he views as most important for a proper classical education today:
Education should be “grounded in classic, canonical works that have withstood the test of time” and “seek to pass on to succeeding generations the full legacy of our Greco-Roman, Judeo-Christian tradition.”
Education should “seek to explode, not acquiesce in, the chronological snobbery of our age.”
Education “should fight hard against the dangers of the historical point of view” encouraging students to study history and “literature as a potential vehicle of goodness, truth, and beauty, and not as an archaic artifact.”
Education should assume that “truth exists, and is knowable, and can be expressed; that we are creatures made in the image of God but fallen; and that the ultimate nature of reality is incarnational.”
Education should “seek to instill a love of and a desire for virtue in their students and strive to help restore in them the traditional stock responses to good and evil.”
While these principles are far from the detailed reading lists, pacing guides, scope and sequences, discipline systems, and budget sheets modern classical teachers and heads of schools might be hoping for, it does the important work of putting first things first, trusting that the secondary items of education will resolve themselves if the whole matter is properly balanced. For any educator struggling to find that balance, C.S. Lewis: An Apologist for Education or any book by C.S. Lewis himself will help.
Ross Garner is a 12th Grade Humanities mentor at John Adams Academy in Roseville, California. He was home-schooled in the classical style with his five siblings, attended a classical charter school, and studied at a liberal arts college in Utah. He has a BA and MA in American Studies from Brigham Young University and Utah State University with an emphasis in political science and American religious history. He loves to garden, serve in his church, and read The Chronicles of Narnia to his two children, whom he home-schools with his wife, Amanda.