There is an old English carol which beautifully captures the essence of ‘True’ or ‘Right’ Education as set out by CS Lewis in his 1944 treatise on Education; ‘The Abolition Of Man’. The carol contains the medieval word ‘richt’ in the sense of right as in ‘true’, not simply proper or fashionable. I first sang part of this carol, ‘Balulalow’, at 9 yrs old (in performances of Britten’s Ceremony Of Carols) and several times through my teens. I sang another part of it, ‘That Yongë Childe’, at 17 yrs old for ABRSM examination. At that time I had no idea what both texts conveyed other than a general allusion to imagery of Nativity themes.
As a music student, delivery of expressive word painting is often the limit of what you have time for when there’s vocal technique, memorization & phrasing to be mastered in too little time before an exam or concert. Not to mention precious rehearsal time with your allotted accompanist. Singing teachers/choral directors are seldom the source for greater depth of symbolic text comprehension, nor are they, in the majority of cases, equipped to offer it. Even the late Stephen Cleobury (Kings College Cambridge Chapel Choir director) commented that choristers’ comprehension of the texts they sing would naturally be limited by time constraints and they comprise those both with and without religious affiliation. The latter being a major factor in avoiding anything which could be viewed suspiciously as Faith based teaching within a secular system of Education, even one rooted for centuries in a Collegiate Foundation.
This secular absence of invitation and access to a deeper, richer understanding of traditional symbolic text has left a teleological, axiological void - as CS Lewis warned it would. When an effort to become intellectually neutral or detached becomes the primary justification for education, the liberal arts and education per se are abandoned. Prior to the rigours of critical thinking, Lewis argues for a more foundational justification and motivation, which he proposed we might call reverence. Lewis argues that without a reverence for objective moral realities that transcend both individual identity (the cult of Selfism) and community (the tyranny of Collectivism), education ultimately dissolves into a set of utilitarian practises focused exclusively on utilitarian ends. The Administrative State managing Human Capital. The emerging Technocracy of slaves on the digital plantation.
A disposition of reverence is not the same as an argument for (or against) theism and Lewis was intentional about that. His motivation was not to proselytize or garner converts to this or that religion (including atheism). His concern was with illustrating how the tyrannical forces of deconstruction, scientism, the increasing dominance of social sciences and progressive doctrine in the Academy would dehumanize current and future generations of students. The (mass) formation of a population without chests, (media addicted) block heads and trousered ape compulsive consumers; model citizens for the emerging technocracy.
Lewis describes dehumanization as ‘failing to see and express the glory in things and lacking ordained affections and just sentiments as well’. Very much the spirit of weaponized resentment, the culture of mob rule and social contagion. The philosophy and pedagogy of Progressive Education has, as Lewis predicted, so devastatingly borne its spoiled fruits and withered leaves throughout our captured, radicalized, propagandized Education System from the very top all the way down - as it was designed to do by vested interests.
For Lewis, modern educational methods (represented by theorists like Dewey, Wundt & latterly Freire etc.) and the primacy progressive education has given to the development of critical thinking skills (parasitically supplanted by Deconstruction, Critical Theory and Queer Theory etc.) encourages a disenchantment of the world, with this disenchantment leading to the eponymous ‘abolition’ of the human condition. Modern education, which on the surface presumes to champion the individual, reduces the individual’s humanity to a utilitarian function through its emphasis on subjective experience and critique. Under this paradigm, the liberal arts university’s traditional presumption that there can be such a thing as full human flourishing beyond mere functionalism ceases to exist.
Lewis advocates for the objective nature of truth, goodness and beauty in culture and the arts. He urges us to ‘see it, seek it out, capture and express it’. The field of aesthetics; traditional visual arts, architecture, music, literature - all require varying degrees of technical & symbolic literacy for participation and comprehension, to move beyond a mere subjective feeling-response and discern the (as Lewis might put it) ‘Tao’ in transmission. I often call it the ‘marrow’ in the bones. That which is living, vital, nourishing - its life force. Not simply a decorative preservation & presentation of dry bones, however impressively arranged with appeal to consumer tastes, fashion & whim, or clicks, likes & sales revenue. I’m reminded of the warning given by the late Roger Scruton:
In ‘The Pilgrim’s Regress’ Lewis captures this brilliantly in a single line:
In the last few years (until choral associations/federations told members to ‘get vaccinated’ and wear masks as ‘best practise’) I was working on devising, delivering and directing projects which went beyond technical appreciation and sentiment. Projects which restored the marrow to the bones, revitalizing audience engagement. The projects reached out beyond domain boundaries & involved collaboration with colleagues from both Visual Arts and Teacher Training, some of whom were initially resistant to our purpose of engaging audience with objective meaning.
My colleagues considered the role of Arts to be exclusively Self expression as creators, or performers and that the focus of audience engagement is oriented to the performer(s) as spectacle with their content to be no more than a soundtrack to personal, subjective feelings in the moment. Any intention of composers to transmit specific ideas or respond to specific stimuli were considered incidental, arbitrary, confined solely to biographical historicized curios. As a heretic, I misplaced the memo that for the last x number of decades we (in Arts Education) have been liberated from the notion that works of Art transmit specific meaning. I never signed up to the notion that as ‘Educators’ we teach students that once an artwork is put ‘out there’ it is the property of the audience to be interpreted individually, subjectively at whim. I don’t support the view that traditional arts can ‘mean’ anything the consuming listener/viewer wants them to. I do see though that for the progressive mindset, it’s a useful fallacy for eradicating literacy and active engagement, in favour of uninformed, passive consumption or rejection. Traditional Arts encountered in this way (self referentially) is the antithesis of The Way (Tao) Lewis described.
Our Education System reduces and limits engagement with the Arts to shifting mood, sentiment & self projection. Traditional repertoire is prevented (to borrow a term from nature) from ‘greening’ - its vital nature can not arise and live (transmit), only its dilettante role with formulaic programming and cosmetic function, even in prestigious institutions. This living vitality, the Tao (Lewis’ doctrine of objective value) has not only been denied in modern education, but increasingly now prohibited, due to exponentially increasing top down imposition of curriculum diktats (driven politically & financially by Critical Theory & Queer Theory ‘scholarship’) in service to UNESCO/UN SDG & ESG Agenda Goals - those exact utilitarian aims Lewis outlined, including the transformation of us, our children and generations to come; our dehumanization - Transhumanism and the managed society of Technocracy in all its Hideous Strength.
Fluency in Traditional Arts literacy (understanding visual arts, comprehending literature, awareness & recognition of musical flow & form) these aspects of attention, memory, recall and association all require cultivating from an early age. They are also faculties of perception which, if nurtured and developed, underpin engagement, enjoyment & attainment across the curriculum and beyond. This is not just for those wanting to participate as potential performers, composers or artists, but crucially, listeners, viewers and thinkers. Our Education System ring fences the domain ‘Performing’ Arts with the curriculum focus of ‘Expressive’ Arts and increasingly over the last 20 yrs the extra curricular function of ‘Recreational’ Arts. This plays right into the agendas and funding strings for Culturally Relevant Teaching, Decolonizing The Curriculum, Critical and Queer Theory purpose. It has Self expression (thereby ‘Identity’) as its rationale, the bridge to those utilitarian aims Lewis warned of in The Abolition Of Man.
Thinking strategically to counter this, imagine what a difference could be made with subject specialists working in partnership across domains to infuse a curriculum with Rational Contemplative Arts as a practical medium for engagement and the restoration of Traditional Arts to their original purpose; communicating symbolic meaning. Identities of creators and performers are irrelevant in this context. The content message to be discerned is key. Performing it requires exacting competencies otherwise there is no clarity to what is conveyed. Reflected light requires a highly polished surface to transmit with necessary brilliance. Ask not what the Arts can do for You, but what you can Do for The Arts. Thinking tactically, imagine how curriculum design could be reconfigured from the inside out. The foundation cultivated for a disposition of reverence (‘True Education’ as Lewis called it - ‘that richt Balulalow’) with Early Years nurturing of the foundations of objective awareness; attention, memory, recall and association across domains rather than subjective Me/My Identity/My World (dutifully expressed from the standpoint of your proscribed Collective of course...).
I don’t suppose many lectures/seminars on Lewis’ Abolition Of Man have included the playing of choral/vocal text which illuminates the essence of Lewis’ message, in what is the most significant treatise on Education of the Twentieth Century. That’s a missed opportunity. The ear worm effect is very handy for ‘in a nutshell’ recall and there are a myriad of examples from Choral literature with which to engage thinkers on all sorts of topics. To know what is conveyed by the beauty of a nightingale song being “hoarse and nought thereto” in comparison to Mary’s melody, or that what she conveyed to her son “passéd alle minstrelsy” would be to gain insight into what is lost when our education is disordered or in Lewis’ terms (from his essay ‘God In The Dock’) when we put second things first. Choral repertoire is a largely unmined rich seam of material with which to create an engaging and memorable soundtrack to learning - whether or not listeners participate as singers/choristers themselves. All that’s necessary is a strategist’s eye to curriculum design, colleagues with affinity for symbolic literacy and a culture of collaboration in planning resources. A cross fertilization of subject domains enabling the varying facets related knowledge to shine, illuminating one another. John Henry Newman’s Idea Of The University called for us to sing that richt Balulalow.
[In preparing for this essay I’ve drawn in part from the insights of Dr. David K. Naugle on cslewis.com and the work of Gabriel Haley, especially his essay ‘The Re-enchantment of Education: CS Lewis Idea of The Holy’, in which the influence on Lewis of the early twentieth century German Lutheran theologian and phenomenologist Rudolf Otto is examined. An essay which I think he also delivered as a lecture at Hillsdale College.]