Abstract
As an educator, C. S. Lewis (1898–1963) took a keen interest in secondary schooling and his thoughts on education are sprinkled throughout many books such as The Abolition of Man (1943). However, his contribution to the field of education and schooling of young people is not so well-known for twenty-first century readers. By drawing upon a wide range of his works Pike’s Mere Education shows Lewis’s educational vision of how school leaders, teachers, and parents enable their students to cultivate good character, seen as a virtue, beyond passing exams and getting grades. According to Pike, like Aristotle, Lewis regards character education as cultivating good habits.
In the perspective of Thomistic natural law, Pike highlights Lewis’s the four ‘Cardinal’ virtues and three ‘Theological’ virtues to show the universality of character education. Demonstrating the necessity of redemption through practicing Christian virtues, he emphasises that character education is critical both before and after conversion. For Lewis, the purpose of Christian education is to cultivate good character and Christ-like personal qualities by inspiring young people to seek objective truth, not subjective and personal feelings. The legitimacy of leadership can be achieved by the character of a community and person which is derived from their beliefs and values.
For this goal, according to Pike, Lewis stresses ‘indoctrination’ of objective truth by reading the Bible in schools. Considering the influence of the Bible, it helps the cultivation of good character and enables young people to enter other worlds. He points out that teachers of adolescents in the post-Christian phase of our culture avoid indoctrinating young people with certain moral values. He acknowledges that deciding to have faith in Christ is a personal choice and all schools should respect the decisions of students in religious matters. However, Lewis places an emphasis on the moral responsibility of parents and teachers to nurture virtue and foster good character in their children. He rejects the general philosophical theory that all values are subjective. He seeks freedom to practice religion, not freedom from religion.
Therefore, Lewis criticizes values-free education. For instance, for him any sexual activity outside heterosexual marriage is sin, but many modern educators believe it is not for the school or teachers to tell young people how they should live. Contrary to ‘marriage education’, ‘sex education’ is limited to sexual health and safety programmes such as avoiding the dangers of STDs and AIDS. Because of that they tend to avoid discussion of the major narratives influencing our understanding of sex such as those of the Judeo-Christian tradition. As he insists morality could not be decided by majority vote, Lewis does not believe democracy to be God’s best polity. This indicates that Pike understands Lewis as a Christian realist.
Pike primarily explores Lewis’s character education in the frame of Aristotelian and Thomistic virtue ethics and mainly in the context of the UK and USA, where a Judeo-Christian heritage is shared. However, this book can be recommended for those who attempt to teach character education for young people by using literature and theology.