C. S. Lewis, best known as the author of The Chronicles of Narnia, was also one of the most profound thinkers of twentieth century Christianity. Along with J. R. R. Tolkien, he has inspired millions of people, include all of the authors at Lantern Hollow Press. On Sundays we would like to take a moment to offer up a little Lewis for your consideration.
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“Education without values, as useful as it is, seems rather to make man a more clever devil.”
—The Abolition of Man
Or not.
Alright, so the above is actually one of the false Lewis quotes that is circulating the internet. Yes, I got caught by it. I pulled it from a list of Lewis quotes when I was trying to get ahead of the curve on these posts. I do think it more or less sums up Lewis’s sentiments, though, so please take the below for what its worth. If the quote is false, perhaps there is some truth in what I have to say about it….
To follow up on last week’s meditation on the more famous passage from The Abolition of Man, this week we have a point of explanation. As a result of the world’s “values-free” philosophy, education often does more harm than it does good.* It makes us more intelligent sinners, and while it might delay the price for our sins, it virtually insures that we will one day pay dearly for them.
As I have mentioned before, anyone with an ounce of real historical knowledge should have no illusions about humanity’s ultimate tendencies. History is littered with the bodies of millions–perhaps billions–of victims who fell prey to our bent towards evil and selfishness. Millions more have suffered to the point that one of the most common charges against God’s existence** is the reality of evil, much of which has it’s origins in the human mind.
Even if you haven’t given the grand sweep of history much thought, you can probably just think back across your own life to points where you have felt the temptation to do something you know was wrong. While I certainly doubt/hope you weren’t thinking about mass murder, the fact is that lying, cheating, stealing, adultery, and other “common” sins are still evil and they do harm others, though on a lesser scale. Most of us give in to temptation often enough to have some real sense of our own natures. It gives the wiser of us the perspective to look at someone farther down the path of evil than we are and say, “There, but for the grace of God, go I.”
Hence, the education of children has always needed to be two pronged: internal and external. In the former, the child is taught how to defend against his or her own nature. They develop the ability to resist the temptation to selfishness, laziness, and downright evil. In the latter they are given the skills they need to interact with the outside world–with colleagues, employers, and jobs.
When you teach only the latter–as we tend to do today–you often by default simply teach a person how to justify and gratify their selfish tendencies and to prolong them as long as possible. They are given no defenses against themselves. Human nature then runs amok and is in fact further enabled to do, ultimately, more damage to the individual and the society as a whole.
Let me offer a quick example: Student cheating. As a college professor, I have seen the numbers of students cheating rise dramatically in the past ten years. Of course, there has always been cheating in school, but (at least when I was coming through high school and college in the 1990s) almost everyone admitted that it was wrong. Not so today. With the increase of “values-free” education, we have seen a corresponding rise in the number of proud cheaters who believe in a “might makes right” (It’s not wrong if I’m “smart” enough not to get caught), “end justifies the means” (I have to cheat to get into a good college) philosophy. In one CNN article, 75% of students in a survey admitted to “serious cheating” and 50% said there was nothing wrong with it. I catch them on a regular basis–stealing or even buying work from the internet–even at Christian institutions. I’m sure I would be frightened to know how many slip through. In the words of Rutgers Professor Donald McCabe in the article above, “Students today find it so much easier to rationalize their cheating.”
Of course they do, when our “values-free” educational system has taught them the very justifications they are using! We are getting what we paid for: “more clever devils.”
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*This observation is neither an argument for avoid school nor a justification for anti-intellectualism. It is an imperative to do education right.
**I do find it ironic how many atheists will toss this argument up against a good God’s existence with complete abandon, and then immediately offer up humanity–the most observable of the sources of evil–for worship in His place.
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