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Lewis the Prophet?

The man. The myth.

Lewis the Prophet?

Postby Stanley Anderson » December 4th, 2007, 9:42 pm

…on a night of rain Frodo smelled a sweet fragrance on the air and heard the sound of singing that came over the water. And then it seemed to him that as in his dream in the house of Bombadil, the grey rain-curtain turned all to silver glass and was rolled back, and he beheld white shores and beyond them a fair green country under a swift sunrise.
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Postby galion » December 4th, 2007, 11:58 pm

"Is Christianity in State schools in England currently treated as an enemy?"

To some extent, yes - or if not as an actual enemy, an embarassing hangover from imperialism that may upset Muslims. In the runup to Christmas, the number of schools that are *not* putting on a Nativity play, but something secular, is attracting comment.[/quote]
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Postby Dr. U » December 8th, 2007, 3:30 am

I've been struck by several of Lewis' books, esp. That Hideous Strength, Screwtape Proposes a Toast, and some of Lewis' essays, about how farseeing he was concerning "New Age" ideas. Lewis foresaw the likelihood of some sort of merging of empiricist skepticism and scientism against Christian faith with mystical monism/worship of the "Life Force", the blending of old pagan darkness with a scientific cachet.

As both a Christian and a scientist, I'm amazed (and dismayed) at the proliferation of books and TV programs by people like Deepak Chopra, and many others, who basically repackage Hinduism and similar beliefs in a pseudo-scientific language. Similarly, the whole Star Wars series combines a highly technological society with a religion much like Taoism, built around balance in an impersonal force that has both a light and a dark side. Of course, in Lewis' day, monism was also very influential, including within the ideology of the Nazis, but perhaps not to the degree today. In any case, I think he sure called this one right.
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Postby rusmeister » December 8th, 2007, 4:35 am

Actually, I find this an extraordinarily interesting topic. Thanks for pointing out that article! I thought I had read God in the Dock, but when I went back and read that one yesterday, I felt like I had never read it before (and given MY background, you would think that one would've stood out for me).

I was a teacher who went through the public teacher prep system after logging over 6,000 hours in class (most teacher candidates have no prior experience). I saw right away that they weren't preparing teachers to teach subject matter in class - that the prime focus was the ideology - ensuring that what the teachers believe conforms with state ideology. This is to be found in the requirements for each individual course, and comes down to forcing a profession of multicultural pluralism and a denial of traditional views.

I spent 4 unhappy years trying to understand why this was. Despite working full-time public, being on the 'inside' (in a way that parents are decidedly not), but finally left, still dazed and confused. It wasn't until more than a year after that that I read John Taylor Gatto. I found that his research into the history of education in the US explained everything - all of the insanity of a system that professed to teach kids (presumably what we parents want them to learn) while in fact achieving very, very little over the 13 years of a child's incarceration in the system. It was like a flash of lightning illuminating a landscape on a dark night, because what Gatto was saying was confirmed by what I had already discovered through my own experience - and of a kind and type that most parents and even teachers wouldn't have.

Anyway, I have a thread loaded with what I have learned - and it is gratifying to know that Lewis and Chesterton back me up pretty much all the way.
So Stanley, here's your personal invitation! Do you take the blue pill, and go back to your ordinary life? Or the red pill, and go down the rabbit hole?


One area where Lewis and Gatto might differ a little is on the ability of individual teachers to affect the system. I think that Lewis is quite right that teachers are not zombies - that if they have something (ie, Christianity) they will transmit it in spite of the system. On the other hand, Lewis never worked in a state system, and there are some points on which I think Gatto is right about the ability of the system to shape the teachers it wants. But for the most part, Lewis fits right in to what Gatto is saying - only Gatto looks back a little further than 20 years.

All of this says that anyone educated in such a system has been indoctrinated - for good or ill, and will have automatic unthinking reactions to certain words or ideas, whether benevolently indoctrinated by protective and loving Christians or malevolently indoctrinated against truth by a system of the world.

So smile! You have automatic programs operating in the hard drive of your mind without your conscious awareness! :smile:
"Eh? Two views? There are a dozen views about everything until you know the answer. Then there's never more than one."
Bill "The Blizzard" Hingest - That Hideous Strength
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Postby Dr. U » December 10th, 2007, 5:20 am

Just read through the 3 pp of RusM's posts about Education on Christian Forum. Very well written and cogent. RusM: You might consider working this up into a book at some point - seriously. I promise to read Gatto, (which in Spanish or Italian, would mean I promise to read the cat, but I digress), as soon as I get a chance, probably after finals are done.

I can add several of my own observations from several points in life, corroborating what he says.

(1) I went through public education in Chicago in the 1960s/early 1970s. I tell some people I know who live in suburban Philadelphia stories of what went on there, and some of them can't believe I'm telling the truth, sounds too much like Charles Dickens! However, my students from inner-city Philadelphia, Camden, Chester, Baltimore, Washington and NYC believe everything I witnessed, b/c their schools today are as bad or worse. And I was not even in a bad neighborhood, just a lower middle class factory area.

The political patronage system of the Democratic Party that has run Chicago for generations protected incredible laziness and incompetence. I witnessed as a child at least two teachers who were mentally ill, one with symptoms that may have been Alzheimers and another - a 1st grade teacher - who was something like a sociopath, making children do things like crawl on all fours and bark in front of her. Parents tried and tried to get the really bad teachers removed, but they were protected by the Democratic Party. The principal of my elementary school would blow cigarette smoke into the face of parents who complained about teachers. (I am no fan of the Republican Party, may I add, but they don't run Chicago.)

For children from poorer families, it's a horrible situation - there are few alternatives, and it is compulsory.

(2) Like RusM, by the end of HS, I was poorly prepared for life. I came into college through the back door while working a labor job. A night class here and there at a junior college on subjects that piqued my interest helped me discover or rediscover how much I really enjoyed learning, after my schooling had, frankly, taken it away. Eventually, I decided to try a semester FT, and kept going. The further I went in my studies, eventually into graduate school, the harder the courses became, but the better my grades became. Looking back, I had to unlearn all the passivity that the school system promotes and learn to feed myself - and organize my time efficiently and work hard. (I tell my science majors early on that one way I know I have succeeded as their teacher is when they begin turning in papers that show that they now know more than I do about a subject - indicating they are successfully teaching themselves and no longer need me.) I eventually got a Ph.D., did research for 8 years, and then accepted a FT job as a Biology professor, which is what I do still.

I have met some very brilliant scientists in my life, and it strikes me how the best don't fit the standard educational package. Francis Collins, head of the Human Genome Project, for example, was home-schooled. His parents didn't do this for Christian reasons - they weren't Christians -but b/c they believed he would get an inferior education to what they could give him. I worked for some years with a Jewish man who won the Nobel Prize. He received most of his pre-college education in yeshiva schools, then blitzed through an MD/PhD. I'm not remotely in their league, but I was surprised how fast I was able to learn Spanish without a class as an adult, after miserable experiences trying to learn German or Russian in high school classes. I'm convinced we're wasting years of the lives of students the way we teach currently. I agree with RusM, after also doing my own background reading about how the current US Education system developed in the 20th Century, that it's about social control more than about training children and young adults in knowledge and wisdom.

Fortunately so far for the US, most university professors do not have to go through the "Education" training process. There's always some deadwood in any university, but - I can only really speak for science - there are still many very good science faculty getting out there. As RusM discusses in his posts, however, NONE of them would be able to teach HS science without several years of "Education" courses!

Along those lines, another scientist I worked with was the son of poor immigrants who escaped Czarist pogroms to come to NYC. During the Depression in the 1930s, it was not uncommon for unemployed Ph.D.s to teach HS science classes. (There were not all the "Education" hoops there are now - they were considered basically competent to teach science b/c they were scientists!) That was the case for my colleague, he had several HS science teachers with Ph.D.s, in a HS in a poor neighborhood in NYC. He later went on to develop the production methods for two vaccines that you would all recognize, profoundly benefiting world health, and many lesser known scientific accomplishments as well. He revisited his old NYC HS once, in the 1980s, and was depressed and angry afterwards when he told us about it over lunch. It was still a poor neighborhood with many immigrants, but now none of the science teachers he met there had science backgrounds, most were stop gaps with no particular preparation to teach science, and certainly none had science Ph.D.s. He was angry that they were stealing the futures of those kids, just as poor as he had been.

(3) Here's a third observation: Among the faculty at mine and many other schools, Education majors are legendary for being the most ill-informed about science, about history, about world events, about almost anything, except "educational theory" and current "policy". They're prepared to do a lesson plan on whatever a school district hands 'em, but not to evaluate whether it's true or right. Many also consider a "B" to be a bad grade, which causes no end of problems. There are, of course, always happy exceptions among "Education" majors, but I will say that I have seen several of the best potential science teachers leave an "Education" major b/c they couldn't stand the, mmm, male bovine waste products any longer.

The saddest thing is, too many of the Education majors don't get it, what they're really missing! As one example, one of our professors last year gave poor test grades to a group of future teachers in the special Physics for Education course we offer. (They would almost all rapidly sink to the bottom in a real Physics course.) She shared some of their answers with me, including one in which a university student in all seriousness had the Sun revolving around the Earth. The students, however, were furious about their grades, on what both the teacher and I perceived as a pretty simple test of basic knowledge anyone who's educated should know about elementary physics, geology and astronomy. And what do you think their group response was to us? Yes! "Why do we need to know this? We're going to be teachers!".

Please don't get me wrong, these are mostly fine kids as human beings, but many really don't understand why there is value in learning as much as you can about all that you can.

Anyway, RusM's posts hit my response button, as did Lewis book' Aboliton of Man when I first encountered it. In line with the subject here, yes, Lewis was very perceptive about where Education in the English-speaking world was going. Men - and women- without chests, indeed.

I'm blessed to think that I've contributed in a small way to a Christian education in biology in the context of how God sees humanity for my students. I have alumni out working in a variety of places, some now with doctorates, and others not, but in places of real influence. I don't know how I personally can take on the whole Educational system, but I am convinced that it's essential that we use every alternative we have to teach genuine thinking within a Christian worldview. We're to be salt and light, a metaphor rich in applications, and for those of us who teach, this is as important a ministry as any.
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Postby nomad » December 15th, 2007, 3:49 am

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"Well," said Pooh, "what I like best -- " and then he had to stop and think. Because although Eating Honey was a very good thing to do, there was a moment just before you began to eat it which was better than when you were, but he didn't know what it was called.
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Postby Robert » December 27th, 2007, 6:37 pm

[I am] Freudian Viennese by night, by day [I am] Marxian Muscovite

--Robert Frost--
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Postby rusmeister » December 28th, 2007, 1:25 am

"Eh? Two views? There are a dozen views about everything until you know the answer. Then there's never more than one."
Bill "The Blizzard" Hingest - That Hideous Strength
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Postby Robert » December 28th, 2007, 2:53 am

[I am] Freudian Viennese by night, by day [I am] Marxian Muscovite

--Robert Frost--
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Postby rusmeister » December 28th, 2007, 5:59 am

"Eh? Two views? There are a dozen views about everything until you know the answer. Then there's never more than one."
Bill "The Blizzard" Hingest - That Hideous Strength
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Postby nomad » January 4th, 2008, 1:43 am

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"Well," said Pooh, "what I like best -- " and then he had to stop and think. Because although Eating Honey was a very good thing to do, there was a moment just before you began to eat it which was better than when you were, but he didn't know what it was called.
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