The Value of Objective Value: C. S. Lewis on Renewing Education

No matter what age you or your children are, I highly recommend The Chronicles of Narnia by C. S. Lewis for summer reading. They are lighthearted yet full of depth. I am reading aloud The Silver Chair, the fourth book in the seven-book series. For those who know the general contours of the series, this book sees Eustace Scrubb return to Narnia accompanied by his classmate Jill Pole. It is a rescue mission, attempting to free Prince Rilian from the clutches of the Emerald Witch.

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.