Category: Education

A Time for Boldness

  

Supreme Court aside, we are changing as a nation regardless. For years, conservatives have comforted themselves by saying that the majority of Americans still hold to traditional morality despite the trend of the government and the media, yet if polls are to be believed—and there is always a caution with that—the majority may no longer be tied to the Biblical values that have characterized our national framework of thinking. We may be on the verge of a radical transformation. Even… Read more »

Lewis, Learning, & War (Part Two)

  

C. S. Lewis’s ruminations on the need for learning, even during times of war or other periods of great stress, in his “Learning in War-Time” essay, are so fulsome that it requires more than one post to cover his key points. This installment focuses on the life of the scholar, so it has special meaning to me. “The intellectual life,” Lewis explains, “is not the only road to God, nor the safest, but we find it to be a road,… Read more »

Lewis, Learning, & War (Part One)

  

I believe I’ve read most of C. S. Lewis’s essays sometime during my life, but some of them I read so long ago I have forgotten the pearls within. I recently re-read his “Learning in War-Time” reflections as Britain was engaged in WWII and was reminded why others have commented on it so often. The big question he asks and attempts to answer is why should people continue to be interested in what are considered the normal, routine matters of… Read more »

Lewis: Christianity & Education

  

I’m preparing to begin my twenty-seventh year of teaching college this fall. One of the joys I’ve had is the free hand to develop upper-level courses for history majors. Due to all my research on C. S. Lewis this year (and my still-hoped-for book on him), I will be teaching a course on him in the upcoming semester. Lewis and education go together. He had many wise and insightful comments on the aims and limits of education. For a good… Read more »

Lewis: Do We Want Vision or Virtue?

  

Is there a moral law to which all men are subjected, or do men create whatever morality exists, according to their own lights? C. S. Lewis says that the second proposition is a disaster. Unfortunately, it’s where we are, to a great extent. In his essay “The Poison of Subjectivism,” Lewis states, Many a popular “planner” on a democratic platform, many a mild-eyed scientist in a democratic laboratory means, in the last resort, just what the Fascist means. He believes… Read more »

A College Education

  

In honor of all the college graduates who have walked across that stage in the past few weeks, I present a Mallard Fillmore running commentary on the state of higher education in America. Lest you get the wrong idea, I’m hardly opposed to a college education. After all, I’ve been teaching at that level for the past 26 years. I am opposed, though, to any college education that is not college level, thereby offering no real education at all. Sadly,… Read more »

Lewis on Progressive Education: God Help Us All

  

C. S. Lewis developed friendships with a number of American college and university professors. One of them, Nathan Comfort Starr, visited Lewis three times over a period of fifteen years, and kept up a steady correspondence with him. Like Lewis, he was a Christian traditionalist when it came to education: learn the classics, hold students to a standard of intellectual rigor. Starr was teaching at Rollins College in Florida in the early 1950s when a “progressive” president at the college… Read more »