In the first chapter of the
Abolition of Man
C.S. Lewis attempts to communicate to the reader that education plays
an important part in the development of ethical values. In addition
to this statement, Lewis also asserts that children’s readers,
guised as harmless texts, can convey hidden messages that have the
potential to harm a child’s developing worldview.
A schoolbook Lewis called the
Green Book was the
piece that moved him to write the Abolition
of Man. Although the
Green Book was an
actual book, this could easily be any one of an entire generation of
books. One lesson in The
Green Book was about
two tourists looking at a waterfall. One tourist said it was pretty;
the other proposed it was sublime. The authors of the Green Book,
Gaius and Titius, said the tourist was actually making a comment
about himself and his own feelings. Gaius and Titius then examined an
advertisement for a fantasy vacation- telling the students they
should learn the difference between honest metaphors and those
intended to con them out of their money. However, the authors fail to
identify how one can tell the difference between the two forms. In
Orbilius’s book, he analyzes a tale about how horses are
willing servants. Lewis suggests rather than simply telling the
student that it is a bad composition, he or she should instead be
presented with a good composition on a similar subject and learn to
tell the difference between the two. Lewis’s reoccurring theme
is that supplying students a piece to see as good and allowing them
to draw their own conclusions is better than presenting them with bad
literature and telling them why it is bad.
The Tao, which Lewis speaks of
briefly in Chapter 1, can be defined as the absolute good. He
believes that the old education, propagation, can replace the new,
propaganda so that students might learn from what is beautiful and
not see only examples of bad.
Lewis
claims for man to be a civil being, his emotions must be trained. He
divides the man into three categories, all competing against one
another. The head competes with the heart, the heart with the
instinct, the instinct with the head, etc. If our emotions ruled,
then none of these other forces would be able to stop us from doing
what we felt like doing at any given time. In the heading of the
chapter, Lewis means to describe men without a heart to drive them.
He believes the new texts are raising young men and women who lack
the heart to know ethical truths or even to care about morality.
