Our English Syllabus

There are three purposes to schooling, C.S. Lewis expresses in his essay “Our English Syllabus”: vocational training, education, and learning. He first explains how both Milton and Aristotle agree that education’s purpose is to produce a “good man,” or as Lewis later says a “human”. Some object to this moniker, as well as to Lewis’ comparison to uneducated people as “animals”. However, I don’t think Lewis is saying that the uneducated are less than human in God’s eyes or even in the world’s eyes, at least in general. He uses “human” and “animal” in the intellectual sense. Without education, someone cannot reach his maximum potential intellectually. In fact, he is like an animal in the sense that all he does is related to his vocation. Education gives us the ability to be leisurely instead of focused only on work, like the animal or the person who goes to school solely to get a job. While it is necessary to have vocational training in our schools, it is crucial we keep education to preserve the dynamic of our civilization: if people are schooled exclusively in subjects needed to get a job, we could become like the barbarians in history who did what they needed to do to survive and that was all. We need additional schooling to preserve culture and civilization.

The second distinction Lewis makes is that between education and learning. I agree with Lewis when he argues that, in education, the teacher is the superior who tries to mold his students into complete intellectual humans. We all heard hundreds of times in high school that we were being prepared for college. Education does just that: it prepares us for the learning that should occur in college. In learning we are intellectual equals with our teachers; we have achieved the status of “good men” or “humans”. In learning, there is a personal “thirst for knowledge”, as Lewis calls it. I agree with Lewis that college should be a place of learning; we should take classes in subjects in which we are interested, and we should learn for the sake of learning. However, as more occupations than ever require college degrees, the pure pursuit of learning is not realistic.

One other interesting thing I found was the attitude we should take to our post-secondary schooling. If we are excited about our classes instead of just thinking we have to take them, we will be better educated. Seek learning, and you will be educated; seek education, and you will learn nothing.

Finally, Lewis tells us that if we do not choose what we want to learn, “The educational ideals of a particular age, class, and philosophy of life would be stamped on your whole career.” I think this is true of Calvin College in a couple of different ways. First, Calvin is a Christian college. It attempts to better us spiritually in addition to academically. However, there are also ideals that aren’t essentially Christian that Calvin wants to stamp on our lives. Calvin’s fixation with diversity and bettering the environment permeate many different areas of life at Calvin. Instead of encouraging us to choose for ourselves what is important to us, Calvin tells us what should be important.