Our educational renewal movement champions a return to the life-giving role great books play in forming lives of flourishing for our students and for society. We want our students to gain an appreciation for great literature and to be devoted to life-long learning. So if our goal is appreciation, should we do away with exams in order to really focus on appreciation? Don’t exams quench the thirst for literary art? In his 1944 essay, C.S. Lewis takes up questions like this with answers that might surprise us today.
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.
