Virtuous Education: Propagation v. Propaganda

“The old way of education dealt with its pupils as grown birds deal with young birds when they teach them to fly; the new deals with them more as the poultry-keeper deals with young birds — making them thus or thus for purposes of which the birds know nothing. In a word, the old was a kind of propagation — men transmitting manhood to men; the new is merely propaganda.” C.S. Lewis, The Abolition of Man

The preceding essays in our series on After Virtue and the Abolition of Man sought to define virtue and determine whether or not virtue ought to be taught in the modern education system. Hopefully, our arguments over the past few weeks have made a compelling case for the virtuous life and its various fruits. This essay aims to establish how virtues should be taught in a much more practical sense. I will begin with an example pulled from The Abolition of Man directly with a dash of narrative flair and a touch of creative liberty.

It starts with what Wilfred Owen would call the old lie following the First World War, “Dulce et Decorum est Pro Patria Mori,” or “it is a sweet and seemly thing to die for one’s country.” This line, drawn from Horace’s Ode’s III.2.13, was originally intended to exhort the Roman people to develop martial virtues in preparation for potential conflicts with the Parthians. C.S. Lewis would have us examine it from a different lens, the Roman father who has served in the legions in defense of Rome and its glory, telling it to his son. His son will be far more receptive to this prompt to martial virtue due to his father having lived it himself.

We cannot teach virtues as one teaches arithmetic or the rote memorization of historical events across recorded history for a standardized exam. For Lewis, virtue must be embodied in the teacher before it is ever engendered in the student. As students, we must see virtue represented before we understand how we can set out to embody it in our own lives. The bird cannot merely be told or instructed how to fly; it must see the grown birds in the act itself. This is an example of the propagation of moral virtue. Contrast this with the British schoolmaster at the beginning of the First World War, a man who is not serving and has not served, who has risked nothing in defense of the British Empire, exhorting his own students to bear the burden. For his students, the tone of his message is flat and out of key. The message and the moral responsibility are heavy, and they are delivered by one who has never borne the weight himself. How can the seeds of this moral teaching take root and grow without evidence? The answer is simple: it cannot. This is the example that Lewis presents for propaganda.

To keep this in far more straightforward and more practical terms, we must be the things we wish to instill in subsequent generations. For a moral heritage for the next generation to inherit, we must safeguard these virtues and, throughout our lives, do our best to embody them. To propagate honesty in the next generation, we must be honest. To propagate frugality, we must be frugal. While we cannot expect perfection of ourselves, as no human is perfect, we must strive to be virtuous and acknowledge our shortcomings honestly and openly when we fail. This leads us to our next point.

”For every one pupil who needs to be guarded against a weak excess of sensibility, there are three who need to be awakened from the slumber of cold vulgarity. The task of the modern educator is not to cut down jungles but to irrigate deserts.” C.S. Lewis, The Abolition of Man

We accomplish this goal through action and the training of emotions. Here, by engendering the rights emotions towards the right actions, we begin the task of irrigating deserts. C.S. Lewis concedes, along with John Locke, that when we are born into this world, we are born into a state of “tabula rasa,” or a blank slate. In other words, we have no mental framework for processing emotions, and we learn these behaviors from our parents and those we are raised around. Our perceptions and emotional inclinations are like wet clay that must be shaped in a particular direction. Here is where the critical work must be done. Ultimately, the approach to the education of morals must be two-pronged. Firstly, those in a position to teach morality must embody the principles they are setting out to teach. Secondly, they must shape their emotional inclinations and their preferences towards these first principles and traditional moral values.