Our English Syllabus

(In Response to "Our English Syllabus" by C.S. Lewis)
The topic of this essay is one that I feel every student should read. Not only every student but every human. This essay embodies the theme that was projected to us in prelude. That we are not here to prepare ourselves for a vocation but to be educated. Education in the sense of not knowing facts and formulas but expanding our minds and learning to think and write critically. We must not train ones mind what it must think but rather how to think for itself. "You see at once that education is essentially for freemen and vocational training for slaves."

Lewis is trying to open up the minds of his students and show to them that they are not here to learn specific facts or trades but to be guided along their own personal journey of learning. That they have already developed a love for learning and that they are merely in a community of people seeking to learn more, guiding each other where each has insight. "The student is, or ought to be, a young man who is already beginning to follow learning for its own sake, and who attaches himself to an older student, not precisely to be taught, but to pick up what he can."

Lewis expands his idea by explaining that "learning is not education; but it can be used educationally by those who do not propose to pursue learning all their lives." Education is much more than learning for four years and saying you are done; rather, education is a means of cultivating that love of learning and developing that into the need to constantly yearn for knowledge.

I feel that this might properly be remedied with the exclusion of grades. When grades are present people learn the material in order to meet a requirement. They don't learn for the joy, they learn out of necessity, with high grades come better job opportunities and so forth. With grades our journey of learning becomes an education that can be completed in four years. Without grades one could learn for the sake of learning and bettering ones self, they could grasp concepts rather than committing insignificant facts to memory. With grades students are more likely to learn in order to pass a test, where education should be learning to better oneself and fulfill the thirst for knowledge.

"It is time you [we] learned to wrestle with nature for yourself [ourselves]."