The A-Z of C. S. Lewis Quotes

“education C.S. Lewis makes many references to education in his fiction. Experiment House*, for instance, in The Voyage of the “Dawn Treader”*, embodies his dislike of modern educational methods. In his opinion Mark Studdock*, in That Hideous Strength*, is characteristic of many of Lewis’s contemporary intelligensia – uneducated by classical standards. Judged only by his satire, however, Lewis would seem intensely prejudiced. This is misleading. His powerful essay The Abolition of Man* suggested that anti-human values were being unwittingly embodied in some typical school textbooks of his time. Lewis nowhere more clearly put forward his vision of education than in his early essay “Our English Syllabus” in Rehabilitations and Other Essays*. He confesses: “Human life means to me the life of beings for whom the leisured activities of thought, art, literature, conversation are the end, and the preservation and propagation of life merely the means. That is why education seems to me so important: it actualizes that potentiality for leisure, if you like for amateurishness, which is man’s prerogative... Man is the only amateur animal; all the others are professionals… The lion cannot stop hunting, nor the beaver building dams… When God made the beasts dumb He saved the world from infinite boredom…”
― Colin Duriez, The A-Z of C.S. Lewis: An encyclopaedia of his life, thought, and writings