It does not seem to me that the current condition in Western eduction is one of emotional suppression and psychological reductionism. Instead, the entire legitimacy of educational insitutions themselves is now up for grabs. Why? Because those institutions are no longer presumed to have a right to cut across the emotional autonomy of their students. 

C.S. Lewis’s line about how moderns “make men without chests and expect of them virtue and enterprise” is famous. It’s become an eminently meme-able quote, and you can find it used in all kinds of diatribes and debates, from transgenderism to pop music. If I had to guess, I would bet that fewer than 30% of the people who quote this line have read the entire essay, and even fewer would be able to correctly answer the question, “What does Lewis mean here by the word ‘chest’?” The answer is not courage or boldness. In the context of the essay, Lewis is saying that a spirit in modern education encourages students to not feel anything at all. Here is an illuminating quote from the essay:

In the second place, I think Gaius and Titius may have honestly misunderstood the pressing educational need of the moment. They see the world around them swayed by emotional propaganda — they have learned from tradition that youth is sentimental — and they conclude that the best thing they can do is to fortify the minds of young people against emotion. My own experience as a teacher tells an opposite tale. For every one pupil who needs to be guarded from a 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. By starving the sensibility of our pupils we only make them easier prey to the propagandist when he comes.

I want to draw your attention to the reference in the first sentence to “the pressing educational need of the moment.” Lewis’s argument is certainly prescient and evergreen, but its also deeply contextual. The rationalism that had become ascendant in the first half of the 20th century is what Lewis is talking about here, especially the kind of rationalism that instrumentalized literature into little more than an experiment of self-realization. Lewis is interrogating the same intellectual tradition from which he emerged (which is one reason why he speaks so incisively about it) and which still held sway, thanks in large part to Freudianism.

Let’s think alongside Lewis for a moment. Could it be that what Lewis perceived as the “pressing educational need of the moment” has changed, at least somewhat? Let me offer a few brief points about how I am thinking we should apply Lewis’s warnings here in our own day.

It seems apparent to me that Lewis’s description of a “cold vulgarity” that was dominant in his experience of education is likely tied to the religious and philosophical context of his day.

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