Unlearning

C.S. Lewis and classical Christian education

Welcome to my newest readers, fellow bibliophiles, and educators!

process (n.)

early 14c., proces, "fact of being carried on" (as in in process), from Old French proces "a journey; continuation, development; legal trial"

I first encountered the process of unlearning when our oldest entered kindergarten decades ago. Our son had been accepted into a classical Christian school, and though excited to jump into something new to us, we were barely aware of what a classical model of education was. We began unlearning immediately. Mind you, no one we met called it that.

Lilias Trotter ᐧ “Desultory Bee” ᐧ 1907

From phonics curriculum to nature studies, we were eager to join with a school where our son was nurtured in a small class with Christ as the center of his education. We listened, read, and studied. We were learning through him and his teacher.

And I do mean learning. It might sound unusual, but unlearning is not the opposite of learning. It’s learning again, starting over, seeing and thinking through things in a new way.

It’s something C.S. Lewis describes well. His works are woven with bits of anecdotes and commentary on the teaching life, many times through the eyes of a student. Through his experiences, Lewis speaks of several processes, one of which I spoke about in March—the process or journey of unlearning.

In his inaugural lecture at Cambridge in 1954, Lewis counters modern historical theory, saying that an uneducated man from Athens would have more to say about Greek tragedy than current history professors ever could.

It is my settled conviction that in order to read old Western literature aright, you must suspend most of the responses and unlearn most of the habits you have acquired in reading modern literature. -“De Descriptione Temporum” 

In Lewis’s chapter on "Edmund Spenser" in Studies in Medieval and Renaissance Literature, he writes,

There is a great difference between rejecting something you have known from the inside and rejecting something (as uneducated people tend to do) simply because it happens to be out of fashion in your own time. It is like the difference between a mature and travelled man's love for his own country and the cocksure conviction of an ignorant adolescent that his own village (which is the only one he knows) is the hub of the universe and does everything in the Only Right Way. For our own age, with all its accepted ideas, stands to the vast extend of historical time much as one village stands to the whole world.

The process of unlearning can also look like an encounter with someone like his tutor, William T. Kirkpatrick, the Great Knock. In Surprised by Joy, Lewis describes his tutor when he first met him in 1914.

He was over six feet tall, very shabbily dressed (like a gardener I thought), lean as a rake, and immensely muscular. His wrinkled face seemed to consist entirely of muscles, so far as it was visible; for he wore mustache and side whiskers with a clean-shaven chin like the emperor Franz Joseph.

Lewis called him a purely logical entity. The idea that human beings should exercise their vocal organs for any purpose except that of communicating or discovering truth was preposterous to Kirkpatrick. The most casual remark was taken as a summons to disputation. Lewis learned how to stop and think, how to talk again. He had to unlearn from his British boarding school years because there was no such thing as “making conversation.” He was knocked down to rebuild his young mind. After Kirk passed away in 1921, Lewis wrote to his father,

It was an atmosphere of unrelenting clearness and rigid honesty of thought that one breathed from living with him–and this I shall be the better for as long as I live.

On my nightstand

1. Plough Quarterly, The Riddle of Nature (Vol 39). I have a number of favorite Plough issues, but this one is replete with stellar essays and gorgeous art. Caroline Moore’s “The Wonder of Moths” is full of the delight of moth traps and hope for the environment. I have followed Norann Voll on Twitter for years ever since she first posted about growing figs in Australia. Her essay “Lambing Season” is full of so many tender reminders of lost sheep and life lessons on the farm.

   

2. Julia Cameron’s The Vein of Gold: A Journey to Your Creative Heart (1996). Like The Artist’s Way (1992), Cameron lays out a path of exercises that stretch me to think, reflect, and write in different ways. If you ever feel stuck as a creative, whether art, song, or writer, these are extremely helpful books. Cameron’s “morning pages” helped me get unstuck two years ago, and they remain part of my fiction and nonfiction writing practice even if I don’t write every day.

lines in springtime with Pippin

As always, please feel free to comment below or email me back. I welcome your thoughts and recommendations.

Christine