This week’s “Daily Journal” guest columnist is Dr. Karen Palasek, Director of Educational and Academic Programs for the John Locke Foundation.
“A modern nation needs a very large class of genuinely educated people, and it is the primary function of schools and universities to supply them. To lower standards or disguise inequalities is fatal.” [C.S. Lewis, in a letter written at Magadalene College, Cambridge, 1962]
“One Democracy was surprised lately when it found that Russia had got ahead of it in science. What a delicious specimen of human blindness! If the whole tendency of their society is opposed to every sort of excellence, why did they expect their scientists to excel?” [C. S. Lewis,” Screwtape Proposes a Toast,” 1959]
I have recently finished my first read-through of C.S. Lewis’ “The Screwtape Letters,” and “Screwtape Proposes a Toast.” I was struck by how closely the complaints Lewis leveled against the American educational system in the “Toast” of 1959 were repeated in studies of American public education undertaken at two subsequent intervals of approximately 20 years each. That’s almost 50 years, rather than just 20, of little progress in the state of America’s public schools.
The egalitarian underpinnings, the lack of rigor, lowering of standards, and feel-good softness that C.S. Lewis observed in the 1950s, and educational philosophies and beliefs that were seriously damaging the American public education system then, seem to have changed substantially little in nearly 50 years.
British author, Christian moralist, and professor of English and medieval and Renaissance literature, C. S. Lewis first made his pointed observations about the American educational system more than 20 years before the comprehensive assessment, and indictment, of American public education, A Nation At Risk, appeared in 1981. In A Nation at Risk and the 2003 Our Schools and Our Future, investigators observed a lack of rigor in American public education, accompanied by the absence of core courses, declining numbers of students taking challenging courses, particularly in the maths and sciences, falling or flat national test scores, and a host of other quality issues. They are not moral or philosophical indictments, but as one reads Lewis’ assessment, it is striking to note how the practical aspects of systemic educational choices may at least have character, if not moral or ethical, repercussions.
The Lewis texts are very definitely moralist writings, and Lewis hopes to teach moral lessons through his device of a toast delivered to the Tempters College for young Devils by a senior devil (Tempter) named Screwtape. The moral and philosophical fashions of the day were being reflected in public education, mostly to the delight of the toastmaster.
Screwtape celebrates what he observes to be a striving for Liberty but a “deep hatred” of personal freedom (a la Rousseau), a government that either prescribes or proscribes most activity, such that
a man could not, without a permit, cut down his own tree with his own axe, make it into planks with his own saw, and use the planks to build a tool-shed in his own garden…
Lewis also complains—through the approving eyes of his character—that the term “democracy” has been perversely redefined from the political ideal that all men should be equally treated, to the social equality statement that I’m as good as you—then used to interpret every difference as an undemocratic claim to superiority. What does that have to do with schools?
In the educational system, Screwtape sees that “dunces and idlers must not be made to feel inferior to intelligent and industrious pupils.” That would be ‘undemocratic.’ To disguise the real differences, of course, all students must receive good marks, have the difficulty level of exams reduced, and, in the extreme, see to it that the “bright pupil remains democratically fettered to his own age-group throughout his school career.” In short, the discouragement and destruction of excellence.
Did education progress at all in the intervening years between observations Lewis made of American public education in 1959, and the reports of the National Commission on Excellence in Education in 1981 and Koret Task Force on K-12 education in 2003? According to the Koret report, “we have gained little by way of better educational results. Twenty years [since 1981] of entering first-graders—about eighty million children—have walked into schools where they have scant chance of learning much more than the youngsters whose plight troubled the Excellence Commission in 1983.”
Screwtape would be delighted that we are largely still in 1959, educationally speaking. The rest of us should be troubled, I think, by so little progress over such a long period of time.