C.S. Lewis on Values Education
A Commentary on The Abolition Of Man
Preface
Some people, particularly those who only know C.S. Lewis from his Narnia series of novels, may be surprised to find that the vast majority of what he wrote during his lifetime was pitched at adult readers. The Abolition Of Man is one such book. Written in 1943, it is a non-fiction work which argues, in a nutshell, that any emphasis on values education must be matched by a belief in universal or objective values and a concomitant belief, specifically, in the values being taught. More specifically, it argues that a world whose leaders and educators continue to consistently espouse moral relativism faces a future in which men are governed by little more than human nature with all its flaws, rather than by conscience and a solid belief system. (In this sense its arguments are comparable to those presented in Huxley's well-known Brave New World. It is an interesting coincidence that Lewis and Huxley died on the same day as John F. Kennedy.)My interest in this particular book stems from more than just an admiration for Lewis's work; as the reader will note in the following pages, I do not always agree with his views. As a member, however insignificant, of the education establishment in Singapore, it has not escaped my notice that a major area of interest in recent years is what we call "values education". The effort to bring the teaching of values into Singapore schools, whilst certainly worthy, is fraught with dangers both overt and covert - not the least of which is that Singapore society harbours a broad spectrum of social groups or circles, each with its own unique moral code or lack thereof, and that many of these groups differ from each other on some point of values which one or both consider to be of grave importance. (The struggle for control of AWARE some years ago is a rather pointed illustration of this issue.)
The history of my own career also offers a couple of fairly significant examples. My first project when I entered the working world was to develop a game and associated curriculum for citizenship education. This, obviously, involved some level of values education. Our team went around and consulted a few experts, and I shall not soon forget what one of those experts said (well, the gist of it; the actual words are somewhat paraphrased, apart from the phrase "stirring strings".)
Expert: "So you're using a game, with an allegorical narrative, to teach citizenship education."
Us: "Yes."
Expert: "I suppose you'll be interested in instilling patriotism. Stirring strings, and all that."
Us: "Yes."
It became clear to me after awhile that neither we nor some of the experts we were speaking to were particularly patriotic Singaporeans in the flag-waving sense. For that matter, nearly half our team was made up of mainland Chinese citizens. We were trying to teach kids a bunch of values that we didn't really believe in.
This anecdote will be important later in this series, so do try not to forget it. (As an aside, the expert mentioned above has been quoted in the papers a number of times, and has contributed with some frequency and fervour to the national debate on values.)
It's worth noting that our team revisited the topic of citizenship education in a later project, and focused more on the values that we ourselves believed in (i.e. values that we thought of as universal human values), and did, in my not-so-humble opinion, a much better job.
So, in summary, I think Lewis's little book has a lot to say to educators who are thinking about how - or whether - to bring values into the classroom in a meaningful way. In my next post, I'll begin to explore the first part of the book, Men Without Chests.
(It has recently come to my notice that my copy of the full text has gone unaccountably missing despite my having read it less than two weeks ago. This is rather upsetting. Though it causes me extreme pain to do so, I may have to work from the brutally abridged version found in an anthology of Selected Works by Lewis, and must beg the reader's indulgence in advance in case this unfortunate circumstance continues.)
