Education as Adventure
C.S. Lewis, Reepicheep, and the Importance of Education
“‘Use? […] Use, Captain? If by use you mean filling our bellies or our purses, I confess it will be no use at all. So far as I know we did not set sail to look for things useful but to seek honor and adventure.’”1
With these words, Reepicheep, the talking mouse from C.S. Lewis’ The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, begins to stir the hearts of his fellow sailors as they prepare to journey beyond the last bit of the known world. What Reepicheep says of their journey I say too of Catholic education. It’s purpose is not to fill our bellies or our purses. Rather, it is an adventure, one, as Reepicheep hopes his is as well, toward “Aslan’s Country.” Unfortunately, modern education has no time for such adventures.
In his excellent book calling Catholics back to a historic view of education, Catholic author, Stratford Caldecott says, “Education is our path to true humanity and wisdom.”2 And, of course, wisdom and true humanity are found only in the adventures that leads us to Christ. Yet, this is no longer the popular view of education. Somewhere in the past education was no longer viewed as an adventure. This began when education was no longer seen as having the Beatific Vision for its goal. Instead the goal was refocused to getting a good––and by good our culture means a high paying––job. Caldecott says of college students, “The idea that they might be there [at college] to grow as human beings, to be inducted into an ancient culture, to become somehow more than they already are is foreign to them.”3 Speaking from experience as both a high school teacher and a former college professor this is something I have consistently seen. Students have lost the sense of wonder that allows them to view education as an adventure leading to Christ and seeing it only as an obstacle on their way to real life. What can be done?
The first things to do as formators–that is parents and teachers–is reorient ourselves, beginning with wonder. Classical philosophy (which included what we would call science) and poetry all began in wonder. Looking at the stars the ancients wondered why they moved, what principles or agents moved them, and if those agents were personal? And if those agents are personal, what are they like and what influence do they have? Wonder is at the root of everything, forgetting that makes education into a business, producing a product rather than an adventure.
This wonderment led to initial calculation of planetary movement. Some of their assumptions were wrong, we are not the center of the universe, let alone of our galaxy, and yet the mathematical calculations they used to predict planetary motion helped found all of modern mathematics. This wondering also allowed Dante to write his Divine Comedy where the pilgrim is on an adventure, leading to his own salvation. Interestingly, this is the same for Eustace Scrubb, the annoying cousin of Lucy and Edmund Pevensie in The Voyage of the Dawn Treader. The titular voyage was about the education of Eustace, who is said to have read the “wrong sort of books.” He must be draconified–that is made into a dragon–without even knowing what a dragon is, and so unlearn bad habits and learn new good ones. This same wonder, moved Aristotle, to look at how people behave. He noticed that all people desire happiness and few really achieve it. So he developed a system of ethics based on good habits, what we now call virtues.
This leads to the second thing we must do to return to the adventure that is Catholic education. We must remember that the purpose of education is the formation of souls. From Plato to Aristotle to Augustine and beyond, education was concerned with ordering the student’s loves. A common phrase these days in education is that we are teaching students not what to think but how to think. Yet this is not quite true for Catholic education. We certainly do want our students to know how to think. We want them trained in logic and rhetoric and grammar. Yet we also want to do more. We aim to train up students who have a taste for the true, the good, and the beautiful. We do this by instructing them in those things, yes, but also by providing exemplars. Beowulf and Arthur become exemplars of courage and justice. Geometry reveals mind-bending secrets hidden in unassuming figures. Art and music wordlessly communicate emotional depths that otherwise may not be expressed.
But how are we to achieve this? What plan or curriculum can encourage our children to wonder, to order their loves, and to see education itself as an adventure? As is often the case with the Catholic Church, the beginnings of the answer can be found in the wealth of our past.
The artes liberales were seven sciences that, when studied correctly, made men free. These sciences were, unfortunately, only studied by the few in the past, but as the Latin saying goes, abusus non tullit usum.4 These arts or sciences were grammar, logic/dialectic, rhetoric, arithmetic, geometry, music, and astronomy. By the fourteenth century, (meta)physics , moral philosophy, and theology would be added to this list of sciences. These ten sciences covered all of human knowledge and were seen as belonging to one chain of education where no discipline can exist without the others like a vast ecosystem where each plant and animal and even microbe is essential to maintain homeostasis. In the Middle Ages, the ultimate depiction of the interconnectedness of all things was the cosmos itself. Dante assigned these ten arts to the nine spheres of the physical universe with the tenth sphere, Heaven.5 Today, we call this understanding of education whereby human character is formed to love what it ought, where knowledge is treated like an adventure based in wonder and where one science is always connected to another, by the name of classical education.
Anyone who knows me will not be surprised that I put classical education forward as the answer to our modern educational malaise. Now, it must be said that there are other models of education employed by Catholic schools to great effect. Yet, Catholic, classical education is a model that is eminently adaptable, capable of being what the Church herself is: ever ancient and ever new. C.S. Lewis in his prescient series of lectures later published under the title The Abolition of Man, worried that modern education in the 40s was creating “men without chests.” The chest represents the spirited, or honor-loving, part of ourselves, our rightly ordered sentiments. Without it we become either all head or all stomach. In his own day there was a tendency to be all head. This cold reason led to atomic bombs, eugenics, and World Wars. As Chesterton once quipped, “Poets do not go mad; but chess-players do.”6 But in our day it is not hard to see that the stomach, the seat of our appetites and passions, has displaced the head. If we want a rightly ordered world, in so far as we can achieve that this side of the Resurrection, then we need to educate men with chests.
It is not too late. Eustace, that delightfully and somewhat horrifically real picture of the boy who is pure reason, was very far gone before he was healed. So if we want to de-draconify those who have let either the head or the stomach take control; if we want to raise up students into men and women with rightly ordered loves; then perhaps it is time to look back up to the heavens––the heavens which declare the glory of the Lord––and wonder.
When Eustace has returned to being a real boy and the sailors of the Dawn Treader can venture no further, Eustace, Lucy, Edmund, and Reepicheep take a small boat and sail through water that seems to be made of liquid light. For Reepicheep, the quest ends as he takes his small coracle and sails over a massive, cresting wave never to be seen by the living again. But Lucy, Edmund, and Eustace reach the end of their voyage and find at its end a person, one who is called Aslan in that world, and Someone else in ours. This is the end of Catholic education, learning the name of that Person in this world.7
C.S. Lewis, Voyage of the Dawn Treader (San Francisco: HarperTrophy, 1982), 192.
Stratford Caldecott, Beauty for Truth’s Sake: On the Re-Enchantment of Education (Grand Rapids: Brazos Press, 2009), 11.
Stratford Caldecott, Beauty for Truth’s Sake: On the Re-Enchantment of Education (Grand Rapids: Brazos Press, 2009), 20.
Abuse does not nullify use.
The moon represents grammar; Mercury, logic; Venus, rhetoric; the sun, arithmetic; Mars, music; Jupiter, geometry; Saturn, astronomy; the Fixed Stars (the realm of the constellations and all other non-planet stars), Physics and Metaphysics; the Primum Mobile (an invisible sphere that is the first moved by God’s love for the universe); and the Empyrean (Heaven), theology.
G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy (New York: John Lane Company, 1908), 27.
This article was originally published in Inland Catholic Magazine.