The Devil Talks Education

                                The Devil Talks Education

In that promising land the spirit of I’m as good as you has already become something more than a generally social influence. It begins to work itself into their educational system. Once you have grasped the tendency, you can easily predict its future developments. The basic principle of the new education is to be that dunces and idlers must not be made to feel inferior to intelligent and industrious pupils. That would be “undemocratic.” These differences between the pupils – for they are obviously and nakedly individual differences – must be disguised.

This can be done on various levels. At universities, examinations must be framed so that nearly all the students get good marks [grade inflation]. Entrance examinations must be framed so that all, or nearly all, citizens can go to universities, whether they have any power (or wish) to profit by higher education or not. At schools, the children who are too stupid or lazy to learn languages and mathematics and elementary science can be set to doing the things that children used to do in their spare time. Let them, for example, make mud-pies and call it modelling. But all the time there must be no faintest hint that they are inferior to the children who are at work. Whatever nonsense they are engaged in must have – I believe the English already use the phrase – “parity of esteem.”

Children who are fit to proceed to a higher class may be artificially kept back, because the others would get a trauma by being left behind. The bright pupil thus remains democratically fettered to his own age-group throughout his school career, and a boy who would be capable of tackling Aeschylus or Dante sits listening to his contemporary’s attempts to spell out A CAT SAT ON THE MAT.

In a word, we may reasonably hope for the virtual abolition of education when I’m as good as you has fully had its way. All incentives to learn and all penalties for not learning will vanish. The few who might want to learn will be prevented; who are they to overtop their fellows? And anyway the teachers will be far too busy reassuring the dunces and patting them on the back to waste any time on real teaching.

Of course this would not follow unless all education became state education. But it will… I’m as good as you is a useful means for the destruction of democratic societies.

(from C.S. Lewis’s The Screwtape Proposes a Toast, 1959)