C.S. Lewis

“For every one pupil who needs to be guarded from a weak excess of sensibility there are three who need to be awakened from the slumber of cold vulgarity. The task of the modern educator is not to cut down jungles but to irrigate deserts. The right defense against false sentiments is to inculcate just sentiments. By starving the sensibility of our pupils we only make them easier prey to the propagandist when he comes. For famished nature will be avenged and a hard heart is no infallible protection against a soft head.”

-C.S. Lewis, The Abolition of Man, pg. 27

 

I very much enjoyed this quote the first time I read it while sitting in my usual reading position - in the can. What strikes me first about the whole of it is his use of “modern educator.” If I were not careful, I would think the description would be of today’s educator rather than the British educators of which he speaks some 70 years past. Yet the criticism remains valid in America many years later. There is a need to cultivate the world of sentiment in the young. It may be a more “politically liberal” view to encourage the growth of human emotion, will, volition as part of the educational curriculum of the young, but it is nonetheless valid to do so for the very reason of starving it breeds the coldness and insensitivity to presume non-human presence and yield to selfish profit and gain. I observe regularly in all walks of American living the tendency to uphold non-human principle over and against the well-being of people. For example, when the company profit margin shrinks, or money is even lost in a fiscal year, what measures do we see taken to gain the profit margin back? How many church congregations risk investing resources into the lives of difficult and high maintenance people for fear of losing that “investment” or the loss of reputation? How many families disintegrate into pieces for the sake of more toys, bigger homes, better insurance, nicer cars? All of these losses are measured by human lives and the lack of “just sentiments” is glaring. When the nature of a man in his emotional and volitional well-being is starved his resulting hard heartedness is truly “no infallible protection against a soft head.” Only from a complete human, sharpened in both his intellectual capacity as well as his heart capacity, come an educated well-balanced being capable of real achievement.