https://quadrant.org.au/opinion/education/2023/05/chalk-and-cheese-education-then-and-now/
In chapter one of The Abolition of Man, published in 1944, C.S. Lewis criticises the way education, instead of teaching students to discriminate between what is true and false and what is good and bad, conditions them to rely on emotions and a subjective view of how individuals relate to one another and perceive and understand the world.
In opposition, drawing on Platonic, Aristotelian, Stoic, Christian and Oriental teachings (what he describes as the Tao), Lewis writes “… what is common to them all is something we cannot neglect. It is the doctrine of objective value, the belief that certain attitudes are really true, and others are really false, to the kind of thing the universe is and the kind of things we are”.
Lewis goes on to suggest, for those immersed in the Tao, calling children delightful and old men venerable is not “to record a psychological fact about our own parental or filial emotions at the moment, but to recognise a quality which demands a certain response from us whether we make it or not”. Central to Lewis’ argument is that children must be taught to appreciate the true nature of things as opposed to the progressive, romanticised view that children grow naturally to discernment and knowledge (now rebadged as ‘self-agency’ and ‘personalised learning’ where teachers are guides by the side).
Lewis writes children “must be trained to feel pleasure, liking, disgust and hatred of those things which really are pleasant, likeable, disgusting and hateful”. For teachers to do otherwise is to impoverish children with a barren, soulless and ego-centred education more akin to what he describes as “merely propaganda”.
Pierre Ryckmans, in his 1996 Boyer Lectures, also stresses the danger of subjectivism. After recounting an episode where an academic attacks Chinese literati painting as bourgeois, Ryckmans writes “From his perspective, value judgments were necessarily a form of cultural arrogance… a vain and subjective expression of social prejudice”. Ryckmans goes on to argue, given the lack of objective values, universities are now dead, but nobody has noticed.
The way literature is taught in schools provides a striking example of how destructive and impoverished education has become. Since the mid-to-late 1960’s the definition of literature has been exploded to include multi-media texts, graffiti, SMS texting, posters and student’s own writing. No longer are students introduced to classic myths, fables, legends and fairy tales and those enduring works that have stood the test of time, have something profound and insightful to say about human nature and the circumambient universe and that are exemplary examples of their craft.
