What comes first: A Christian society or a Christian education? In 1946, C.S. Lewis offered an answer to that question in his preface to a sadly forgotten book that was as punchy as it was quirky, B. G. Sandhurst’s How Heathen Is Britain?
Lewis emphasizes several themes that remain salient to this day: the cultural importance and urgency of evangelism, the false hope educators place in centralized planning and general bureaucracy, and the role Christianity plays in the fight against tyranny.
I’m privileged to work with a veteran, masterful teacher who re-reads Abolition of Man at the start of each school year. At his insistence, I’ve come to do the same. The essay below is a wonderful example of why, for so many of us, C.S. Lewis remains a paragon of pedagogy.
The words which follow are his:
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The schoolmasters of today are, for the most part, the undergraduates of twenty years ago – the products of the “post-war” period. It is the mental climate of the Twenties that now dominates the from room class. In other words, the sources of unbelief among young people today do not lie in those young people. The outlook which they have – until they are taught better – is a backwash from an earlier period. It is nothing intrinsic to themselves which holds them back from the Faith.
This very obvious fact – that each generation is taught by an earlier generation – must be kept very firmly in mind. The beliefs which boys fresh from school now hold are largely the beliefs of the Twenties. The beliefs which boys from school will hold in the Sixties will be largely those of the undergraduates of today. The moment we forget this we begin to talk nonsense about education.
We talk of the views of contemporary adolescence as if some peculiarity in contemporary adolescence had produced them out of itself. In reality, they are usually a delayed result – for the mental world also has its time-bombs – of obsolete adolescence, now middle-aged and dominating its form room. Hence the futility of many schemes for education. None can give to another what he does not possess himself.
No generation can bequeath to its successor what it has not got. You may frame the syllabus as you please. But when you have planned and reported ad nauseam, if we are skeptical we shall teach only skepticism to our pupils, if fools only folly, if vulgar only vulgarity, if saints sanctity, if heroes heroism. Education is only the most fully conscious of the channels whereby each generation influences the next. It is not a closed system. Nothing which was not in the teachers can flow from them into the pupils. We shall all admit that a man who knows no Greek himself cannot teach Greek to his form: but it is equally certain that a man whose mind was formed in a period of cynicism and disillusion, cannot teach hope or fortitude.
A society which is predominantly Christian will propagate Christianity through its schools:
one which is not, will not. All the ministries of education in the world cannot alter this law. We
have, in the long run, little either to hope or fear from government.
The State may take education more and more firmly under its wing. I do not doubt that by so doing it can foster conformity, perhaps even servility, up to a point; the power of the State to deliberalize a profession is undoubtedly very great. But all the teaching must still be done by concrete human individuals. The State has to use the men who exist.
Nay, as long as we remain a democracy, it is men who give the State its powers. And over these men, until all freedom is extinguished, the free winds of opinion blow. Their minds are formed by influences which government cannot control. And as they come to be, so will they teach. Let the abstract scheme of education be what it will: its actual operation will be what the men make it. No doubt, there will be in each generation of teachers a percentage, perhaps even a majority, of government tools. But I do not think it is they who will determine the actual character of the education.
The boy – and perhaps especially the English boy – has a sound instinct. The teaching of one true man will carry further and print deeper than that of a dozen white Babus. A minister of education (going back, unless I am mistaken, as far as Julian the Apostate for his precedent) may banish Christian clergy from the schools. But if the wind of opinion is blowing in the Christian direction, it will make no difference. It may even do us good; and the minister will have been unknowingly “the goddes boteler”.
We are often told that education is a key position. That is very false in one sense and very true in another. If it means that you can do any great thing by interfering with existing schools, altering curricula and the like, it is very false. As the teachers are, so they will teach. Your “reform” may incommode and overwork them, but it will not radically alter the total effect of their teaching.
Planning has no magic whereby it can elicit figs from thistles or choke-pears from vines. The rich, sappy, fruit-laden tree will bear sweetness and strength and spiritual health: the dry, prickly, withered tree will teach hate, jealousy, suspicion, and inferiority complex- whatever you tell it to teach. They will do it unknowingly and all day long. But if we mean that to make adult Christians now and even beyond that circle, to spread the immediately sub-Christian perceptions and virtues, the rich Platonic or Virgilian penumbra of the Faith, and thus to alter the type who will be teachers in the future- if we mean that to do this is to perform the greatest of all services for our descendants, then it is very true.
To blame the schoolmasters of the last ten years for it would be ridiculous. The majority of them failed to hand on Christianity because they had it not: will you blame a eunuch because he gets no children or a stone because it yields no blood? The minority, isolated in a hostile environment, have probably done all they could, have perhaps done wonders: but little was in their power. Our author has also shown that the ignorance and incredulity of the pupils are very often removable – their roots far shallower than we had feared. I do not draw from this moral that it is now our business to “get our teeth into the schools”. For one thing, I do not think we shall be allowed to. It is unlikely that in the next forty years England will have a government which would encourage or even tolerate any radically Christian elements in its State system of education. Where the tide flows towards
increasing State control, Christianity, with its claims in one way personal and in the other way
ecumenical and both ways antithetical to omnicompetent government, must always in fact
(though not for a long time yet in words) be treated as an enemy. Like learning, like the family,
like any ancient and liberal profession, like the common law, it gives the individual a standing
ground against the State. Hence Rousseau, the father of the totalitarians, said wisely enough,
from his own point of view, of Christianity, Je ne connais rien de plus contraire à l‟esprit
social. In the second place, even if we were permitted to force a Christian curriculum on the
existing schools with the existing teachers we should only be making masters hypocrites and
hardening thereby the pupils‟ hearts.
I am speaking, of course, of large schools on which a secular character is already stamped. If
any man, in some little corner out of the reach of the omnicompetent, can make, or preserve a
really Christian school, that is another matter. His duty is plain.
I do not, therefore, think that our hope of re-baptizing England lies in trying to “get at” the schools. Education is not in that sense a key position. To convert one‟s adult neighbour and one‟s adolescent neighbour (just free from school) is the practical thing. The cadet, the undergraduate, the young worker in the C.W.U. are obvious targets: but any one and every one is a target. If you make the adults of today Christian, the children of tomorrow will receive a Christian education. What a society has, that, be sure, and nothing else, it will hand on to its young.
The work is urgent, for men perish around us. But there is no need to be uneasy about the ultimate event. As long as Christians have children and non-Christians do not, one need have no anxiety for the next century. Those who worship the Life-Force do not do much about transmitting it: those whose hopes are all based on the terrestrial future do not entrust much to it. If these processes continue, the final issue can hardly be in doubt.
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