Education in Narnia
Schools don’t get a great press in Narnia. One of the Pevensies’ first acts as Kings and Queens of Narnia is to liberate “young dwarfs and young satyrs from being sent to school,” a decision Aslan clearly commends because he also liberates a young girl from school at the end of Prince Caspian. In The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe we hear about “that horrid school … where [Edmund] had begun to go wrong” and in The Silver Chair the narrator promises that he will “say as little about Jill’s school” as possible since it “is not a pleasant subject.”
Schools are generally condemned but education is a different matter. On discovering that he is now the Prince of Archenland, Shasta may complain that “Education and all sorts of horrible things are going to happen to me” but the education he is promised is quite different to anything Jill and Eustace experience at Experiment House: “I shall be learning reading and writing and heraldry and dancing and history and music.” He is being trained to be the king.
In Prince Caspian we read about a similar training, though we also discover that education is a battleground. Doctor Cornelius is secretly undermining the education the usurper Miraz has ordered for Caspian. When the prince shudders at the thought of the Black Woods, Cornelius says, “Your majesty speaks as you have been taught.” The lessons he teaches Caspian, by contrast, are built on the true stories of Narnia, which bring first danger but then great freedom to the young prince.
What we learn, above all else, in the Chronicles of Narnia is that stories matter. The main problem Eustace faces in The Voyage of the Dawn Treader is that he “had read none of the right books.” The obvious question, then, is what those right books might be, the books that any education worthy of the name should include. The narrator tells us a few pages later: “Eustace had read only the wrong books. They had a lot to say about exports and imports and governments and drains, but they were weak on dragons.” There, in a nutshell, you have C. S. Lewis’s educational advice: find books for your children that are not “weak on dragons.”
Again and again in the Chronicles, the children are saved by their love of good books, while other characters go astray because that aspect of their education has been deficient. When Eustace is turned into a dragon, for example, he fails to communicate effectively with the others because he “(never having read the right books) had no idea how to tell a story straight.” By contrast, when Edmund finds the armour of one of the missing Narnian lords, he has an inkling that something is wrong because he was “the only one of the party who had read several detective stories.”
Lewis was no literary snob. He didn’t believe that reading the wrong sort of books prevented anyone from becoming a virtuous person, though he did think that it made the task considerably harder, as we learn later in The Voyage of the Dawn Treader. When the ship arrives at the island of the three sleepers, Reepicheep announces that he plans to stay by the sleepers’ table throughout the night even though the “whole place smells of magic – and danger.” One by one the others agree to stay with him: “And then Eustace volunteered also. This was very brave of him because never having read of such things or even heard of them till he joined the Dawn Treader made it worse for him than for the others.”
It is a sign of how far Eustace has come that, despite the narrowness of his reading, he is able to find the courage to do the right thing at this key moment. Books are important but not absolutely necessary for moral growth, the narrative suggests.
Good books help prepare the children for virtue but it is the choices they make when they are away from books (and away from the classroom) which really matter. That is why Peter insists that the children should explore the Professor’s house in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe rather than read his books. That is why Shasta objects to “Education”: he believes he has already had all the education he needs. That is why Aslan so often leaves the children to fend for themselves: he is a great teacher. In fact, he is the greatest Teacher of all. He knows what education really is and refuses to stand in the way of the children as they learn.
I have no pat conclusion to offer teachers and families today other than this: if we want to become better students and better educators, we could do a lot worse than re-read the Chronicles of Narnia.
(This article first appeared in the Catholic Herald.)