They see the world around them swayed by emotional propaganda; they have learned from tradition that youth is sentimental; and they conclude that the best thing they can do is to fortify the minds of young people against emotion.
My own experience as a teacher tells an opposite tale. For every one pupil who needs to be guarded from 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. The right defence against false sentiments is to inculcate just sentiments.
By starving the sensibility of our pupils we only make them easier prey to the propagandist when he comes. For famished nature will be avenged and a hard heart is no infallible protection against a soft head.
C.S. Lewis — Abolition of Man
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This quote is from C.S. Lewis's short book The Abolition of Man, published in 1943 during World War II. It started as three lectures on education. Lewis attacks modern teaching that treats all feelings as meaningless and subjective. He says educators think students are too emotional and try to protect them by killing emotion altogether. From his own teaching, Lewis saw the opposite: most students are already dull, cynical, and emotionally empty. The real job of a teacher, he says, is not to chop down jungles of feeling but to water deserts of the heart. We should train young people to feel the right emotions toward good and bad things. If we starve their emotions instead, they become easy targets for propagandists later. A cold heart does not protect a soft head; it usually goes with one. In short, proper education builds a strong, well-trained emotional center between pure intellect and basic appetites. Without it, people lose their humanity.
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