Are you concerned about the state of education in America today? You should be. Challenge and high expectations for students are no longer teachers’ main criteria. Lecturing is out. Group work is in. Teachers are expected to entertain, to divert, to achieve the Most Popular Teacher of the Year Award. Such goals, although not necessarily intrinsically wrong, deny God-given ideals about teaching the young. Young people want to learn. God created all of us with a desire to know things, to assess the material, to grow in our understanding of the world in which we live. Teachers are to challenge the young, to teach specifics, to ensure that the young minds in front of them assimilate the material. Teachers are to instruct according to a well-designed plan and to convey the material in an orderly fashion. The teacher, not the child, is in charge.

As long ago as 1947, Dorothy Sayers delivered a seminal lecture at Oxford University entitled “The Lost Tools of Learning.” She warned her audience that “we have lost the tools of learning, and in their absence can only make a botched and piecemeal job of it.” Sayers suggested that educators teach children many subjects but neglect to teach them a fundamental principle: how to learn. The situation in today’s classroom has deteriorated appallingly since the 1940s. Students are not being taught how to learn, and some overworked teachers must include CRT and gender issues in the curriculum.

In The Abolition of Man, C. S. Lewis challenges prevailing notions about education in the 20^th century. Citing Aristotle’s wisdom, C. S. Lewis comments that “the aim of education is to make the pupil like and dislike what he ought” (The Abolition of Man 29). A fine goal for the educator. Teachers, parents are to cultivate in the young a love of great literature, for example, and its opposite, to nurture the ability to distinguish between the genuine and the flashy article. The teacher is to train the young mind so that mind can discern virtue and vice. Some of those young minds will eventually become leaders of our society, leaders who shape our moral values. Parents surely have a sacred, God-given responsibility to ensure that their children mature to become principled, virtuous adults who love the things endorsed and loved by Almighty God.