Our English Syllabus

"Learning is not education; but it can be used educationally by those who do not propose to pursue learning in all their lives. There is nothing odd in the existence of such a byproduct. Games are essentially for pleasure, but they happen to produce health. they are not likely, however, to produce health if they are played for the sake of it. Play to win and you will find yourself taking violent exercise; play because it is good for you and you will not. In the same way, though you may have come here only to be educated, you will never receive that precise educational gift which a university has to give you unless you can at least pretend, so long as you are with us, that you are concerned not with education but with knowledge for its own sake."

C.S. Lewis once again hits the nail on the head when it comes to thinking. In this essay, entitled Our English Syllabus he exhorts his students at Oxford University to pursue learning as opposed to education or vocational training. His view of education is that it concerns the acquiring of skills, such as language, that will prepare the students for learning at the university. He, as a professor, will then assume that the student has acquired those skills at high school or what have you, and is then ready to use them in the service of learning.

Learning, as opposed to vocational training, is the pursuit of the knowledge that concerns a given subject that is in the interest of the student. In order to properly learn, the student must choose a subject that is most interesting to him, and then pursue the knowledge of everything that pertains to that subject from the bottom up. Lewis has a good analogy to convey what he means, in this analogy he is talking about pursuing the study of the English language, of which he was a professor:

"If we picture our subject as a tree we have first of all the soil in which it grows: that is, the history of the English people, social, economic, and intellectual....The great central tap-root is old Germanic developing, as we pass above the ground-level, into Old English. A second root, not quite so big and important as this, is Old French..."

He goes on to further develop that analogy, but the basic idea is that if your aim is learning, then you need to start at that subjects beginning, and then study everything that affected it, along side of studying the subject itself. This stands in opposition to the idea of vocational training, which is the study of only the subject of interest without the factors affecting it. Vocational training pumps out specialists, which, according to Lewis, behave similar to animals. The idea is that animals mindlessly go about their day-to-day activities working for survival; in a similar way, one who specializes in a trade knows nothing other than that trade and so their life falls into a mundane cycle. Here I personally think that Lewis goes a little to far. Human beings are still human beings even if they don't have an extensive education. Education is not the most important thing in life, but having a relationship with God which was established by God through hearing the preaching, studying the Word, prayer, and the communion of the saints is the most important thing.

So, my conclusions on this essay are this. C.S. Lewis did a wonderful job describing the most effective means of gaining knowledge. Studying for the sake of knowing is an excellent approach to ones education which would result in a well-rounded person with a multitude of skills, and the byproduct is, just as exercise is the byproduct of competitive sports, the ability to hold a vocation. However, I think it needs to be said that learning the disciplines of the world (science, mathematics, language, etc.) do not open the door to Heaven, and so we ought to regard those who do not go to college as just as fully human as ourselves.


By the way, this essay was written to college students, so when C.S. Lewis compared certain people to animals he was mostly criticizing the method by which they were trained. So what I am saying is that I don't think he was trying to insult people, but rather scare his own students out of following the same training method.