Turning Back the Wheel of Progress

…if we are to produce a society of educated people, fitted to preserve their intellectual freedom amid the complex pressures of our modern society, we must turn back the wheel of progress some four or five hundred years, to the point at which education began to lose sight of its true object, towards the end of the Middle Ages.
- Dorothy Sayers, “The Lost Tools of Learning”

I’ve had my head wrapped in Clive Staples Lewis for the past couple months (as I’ve been teaching this class), and the most notable feature of my study thus far is probably the sort of education he received and delivered. This, by and large, was “Classics” – but it was remarkably thorough in that he studied not just the history and language of Latin or Greek (the definition of “Classics” that I’d learned in school); his course of study applied such a wide range of disciplines to whatever he read. So, of course modern thought was important and fit for study, but the foundation of these modern questions was (and remains to be) found in antiquity. That is, all good and truthful ideas are really just old ideas – found in old books, written by old thinkers, and now (probably at an ever-diminishing rate) only taught by old dinosaurs of teachers (as Lewis might say).

My friend Dan recently recommended Dorothy Sayers’ article “The Lost Tools of Learning” – it’s really her set of suggestions about how to teach young people – from childhood to adolescence. She laments keeping kids in school too long, thus extending that adolescence; she prescribes a Scholastic model, based on Medieval practices (yes, there was a lively educational institution in those “Dark Ages”). You should learn Grammar, Dialectic, and Rhetoric all by 16.

And honestly, the “Scholastic School of Sayers” is something I would have shuddered at as a kid. But now the only shuddering I’m doing is based on the fact that I have read only too little of ancient thought and history. Better late than never, or so they say.

So, how does a 26-year-old catch up? Or a 30 something or older, for that matter? Its tough advice, since the learning curve is so steep – but I think we need to take Lewis’ advice for ourselves and READ OLD BOOKS, and we need to take Sayers’ advice for our children and TURN BACK THE WHEEL.

Aching for the dear reader’s thoughts on this.

Alas! Modernity! Part 2 of 2 (The Poem)

Aye! Modernity! Realize what no machine could do: feel the rebuke, know the shame! How does mythopoeia translate to zeros and ones?

And the Guide sang:

Iron will eat the world’s old beauty up.
Girder and grid and gantry will arise,
Iron forest of engines will arise,
Criss-cross of iron crotchet. For your eyes
No green or growth. Over all, the skies
Scribbled from end to end with boasts and lies.
(When Adam ate the irrevocable apple, Thou
Saw’st beyond death the resurrection of the dead.)

Clamour shall clean put out the voice of wisdom,
The printing-presses with their clapping wings,
Fouling your nourishment. Harpy wings,
Filling your minds all day with foolish things,
Will tame the eagle Thought: till she sings
Parrot-like in her cage to please dark kings.
(When Israel descended into Egypt, Thou
Dist purpose both the bondage and the coming out._

Tis new age, the new art, the new ethic and thought,
And fools crying, Because it has begun
It will continue as it has begun!
The wheel runs fast, therefore the wheel will run
Faster for ever. The old age is done,
We have new lights and see without the sun.
(Though they lay flat the mountains and dry up the sea,
Wilt thou yet change, as though God were a god?)

C.S. Lewis, The Pilgrim’s Regress, Book X, Chapter vi; On the denaturalization of the earth, the dethroning of wisdom, and the love of uninhibited progress – with an eye to redeeming purpose beyond the toil

Alas! Modernity! Part 1 of 2 (The Prose)

Oh, blessed and damned Machine Age! Hearken! You’ve heard of your futility before. I merely – pray not vainly – repeat:

‘There must be a good side somewhere to this revolution,’ said Vertue. ‘It is too solid – it looks to lasting – to be a mere evil…”

The Guide laughed. ‘You are falling into their own error,’ he said. ‘The change is not radical, nor will it be permanent. That idea depends on a curious disease which they have all caught – an inability to disbelieve advertisements. To be sure, if the machines did what they promised, the change would be very deep indeed. There next war, for example, would change the state of their country from disease to death. They are afraid of this themselves – though most of them are old enough to know by experience that a gun is no more likely than a toothpaste or a cosmetic to do the things its makers say it will do.

‘It is the same with all their machines. Their labor-saving devices multiply drudgery; their aphrodisiacs make them impotent: their amusements bore them: their rapid production of food leaves half of them starving, and their devices for saving them have banished leisure from their country. There will be no radical change.

‘And as for permanence – consider how quickly all machines are broken and obliterated. The black solitudes will some day be green again, and of all cities that I have seen these iron cities will break most suddenly.’

C.S. Lewis, The Pilgrim’s Regress, Book X, Chapter vi; On the futile shift from classical to scientific education

Tasty, iddn’t it? Part 2 coming soon.

New Class: Clive Staples

So we’ve just wrapped up a 14-week class I was teaching on Philosophy & Worldview. Great great fun! Challenging for all, I think, but exactly what we (or, I, at the least) need to stay engaged and enjoying life.

So much so, in fact, that I’ve got another class starting up soon, on the lovely life and work of a man most of us (religious and ir-) look up to his unmatched combination of clarity, wit, smarts, creativity, and kind-heartedly brutal honesty (in some of his most powerful moments).

Feel free to track with the course via this new blog:
CLIVE STAPLES: The Life and Work of C.S. Lewis