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Wrestling With Lewis


My reading list for the summer was anything C.S. Lewis.  And I've made it...through one of his books.  "The Abolition of Man," in which Lewis reflects on education, society, and nature.   He "challenges our notions about how to best teach our children-and ourselves-not merely reading and writing, but also a sense of morality."

If you are an educator, then this is a book to wrestle with!  In fact, please read this book and share with me your thoughts and understanding of it.  

My husband says that until we really wrestle with something then we don't really understand it deeply.  I've wrestled and I'm not sure I understand it deeply.

What I do know is that we have to be very careful as educators, parents, and community leaders to teach and not to condition them.  To wrestle and think things through!

"Up to that point, the kind of explanation which explains things away may give us something, though at a heavy cost.  But you cannot go on 'explaining away' for ever: you will find that you have explained explanation itself away.  You cannot go on 'seeing through' things for ever.  The whole point of see through something is to see something through it.  It is good that the window should be transparent, because the street or garden beyond it is opaque.  How if you saw through the garden too?  It is no use trying to 'see through' first principles.  If you see through everything, then everything is transparent.  But a wholly transparent world is an invisible world.  To 'see through' all things is the same as not to see." p. 87

"It came burning hot into my mind, whatever he said and however he flattered, when he got me to his house, he would see me for a slave."  John Bunyan


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