The abolition of man, or, Reflections on education with special reference to the teaching of English in the upper forms of schools | 
panNo. I'm a huge (205 lb) C.S. Lewis fan, but this was nonsense based on a misunderstanding of 'feeling' and 'thinking'. Lewis throws up his hands and cries that man is doomed if we can discover no absolutes through our 'objectivity'. Sorry, my friend, we are by nature subjective and our man-made absolutes are too.
so-soI only put so so because it was so hard to read. I need to read it again, more slowly next time. Some great thoughts and points that he makes though.
We have been trying, like Lear, to have it both ways: to lay down our human prerogative and yet at the same time to retain it. It is impossible. Either we are rational spirit obliged for ever to obey the absolute value of the Tao, or else we are mere nature to be kneaded and cut into new shapes for the pleasures of masters who must, by hypothesis, have no motive but their own 'natural' impulses.
"We do not look at trees either as Dryads or as beautiful objects while we cut them into beams: the first man who did so may have felt the price keenly, and the bleeding trees in Virgil and Spenser may be far-off echoes of that primeval sense of impiety. The stars lost their divinity as astronomy developed, and the Dying God has no place in chemical agriculture."
We have lost our sense of the sacred.
The rebellion of new ideologies against the Tao is a rebellion of branches against the tree: if the rebels could succeed they would find that they had destroyed themselves. The human mind has no more power of inventing a new value than of imagining a new primary colour, or, indeed, of creating a new sun and a new sky for it to move in.
The Innovator attacks traditional values in defence of what he at first supposes to be (in some special sense) 'rational' or 'biological' values. But as we have seen, all the values which he uses in attacking the Tao, and even claims to be substituting for it, are themselves derived from the Tao.
Telling us to obey Instinct is like telling us to obey 'people'. People say different things: so do instincts. Our instincts are at war. If it is held that the instinct for preserving the species should always be obeyed at the expense of other instincts, whence do we derive this rule of precedence? To listen to that instinct speaking in its own cause and deciding it in its favor would be rather simple-minded.
It is not excess of thought but defect of fertile and generous emotion that marks them out. Their heads are no bigger than the ordinary: it is there atrophy of the chest beneath that makes them seem so.
What the old [education] initiated, the new merely 'conditions'. The old dealt with its pupils as grown birds deal with young birds when they teach them to fly; the new deals with them more as the poultry-keeper deals with young birds -- making them thus or thus for purposes of which the birds know nothing. In a word, the old was a kind of propagation -- men transmitting manhood to men; the new is merely propaganda.
Aristotle says that the aim of education is to make the pupil like & dislike what he ought.... In the Republic, the well-nurtured youth is one who would see most clearly whatever was amiss in ill-made works of man or... nature, and with a just distaste would blame & hate the ugly even from his earliest years & would give delighted praise to beauty, receiving it into his soul & being nourished by it, so that he becomes a man of gentle heart.
For every one pupil who needs to be guarded from 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 defence against false sentiments is to inculcate just sentiments.... For famished nature will be and and a hard heart is no infallible protection against a soft head.
pickLewis is a master of logical argument. The book is a defense of natural law, or foundational moral principles, not because they can be deduced or proven but because they are axioms of civilization. Made me want to be able to argue / defend like he does. It's a short read too- he's concise.
