In this quote Lewis clearly shows the importance of every educational decision, especially those concerning curricula. When writing a text book ethics, theology, and politics inevitably become wrapped up in the instruction.
“Their words are that we ‘appear to be saying something very important’ when in reality we are ‘only saying something about our own feelings.’ No schoolboy will be able to resist the suggestion brought to bear upon him by that word only. I do not mean, of course, that he will make any conscious inference from what he reads to a general philosophical theory that all values are subjective and trivial. The very power of Gaius and Titus depends on the fact that they are dealing with a boy: a boy who thinks he is ‘doing’ his ‘English prep’ and has no notion that ethics, theology, and politics are all at stake. It is not a theory they put into his mind, but an assumption, which ten years hence, its origin forgotten and its presence unconscious, will condition him to take one side in a controversy which he has never recognized as a controversy at all. The authors themselves, I suspect, hardly know what they are doing to the boy, and he cannot know what is being done to him.”
C.S. Lewis, The Abolition of Man: or Reflections on Education with Special Reference to the Teaching of English in the Upper Forms of Schools (1947 repr., New York: Collier Books, 1955), 16-17.
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