C.S. Lewis: A Philosophy of Education

The day is rapidly approaching when a single model of thought will dominate the entire world and its institutions, above all the institution of education. No one understood or anticipated this better than C.S. Lewis. Already some sixty years ago Lewis was warning the public about the dire effects of this model, arguing forcefully that it would prove irresistible and inevitably bring about a world of post-humanity, a world "which, some knowingly and some unknowingly, nearly all men in all nations are at present laboring to produce." This would not be the popular image of oppression as expressed in the dystopian book 1984, but a system filled with new and better things, material growth, better technology, and the seeming resolution to all manner of social choice problems.

Collaborating with the genius of C.S. Lewis, and particularly his brilliant work The Abolition of Man, the authors identify the main institutional forces that today persuade modern man to freely accept this distorted vision of reality and with it pay the ultimate price of his own demise. The authors provide the institutional lines of thought upon which the culture, and specifically education, might reverse this trend and proceed to solution; indicating a clear counter direction for higher and lower forms of education (and other social institutions) that includes the ontological, epistemological, and moral conditions for the proper functioning of the institution, that is, for bringing man into a just relation with himself, with others, and with the Divine.