Few criticisms of modern education have aged as well as C.S. Lewis’s 1943 The Abolition of Man. In “Men without Chests,” Lewis explains, “we remove the organ and demand the function. We make men without chests and expect of them virtue and enterprise. . . .We castrate and bid the geldings be fruitful.” The chest, in this context, is the trained heart that subordinates the appetites to the right use of reason. While Lewis focused on the chest, we can extend the analysis to the head, where the same surgery is performed on both the “mind” and “intelligence.”
Lewis presaged the current crisis of intellect when he described the men that a debunking education produces. He called them Men without Chests; we call them “critical thinkers.” Of them he wrote: “It is an outrage that they should be commonly spoken of as Intellectuals. This gives them the chance to say that he who attacks them attacks Intelligence.” Today, “intelligence” has suffered the same fate as the “intellectual.”
“Mind” and “intellect” are words that point to realities that are immaterial in nature. Consistently eradicating all immaterial things from educational theory leaves these concepts especially vulnerable to abuse. Ask any school faculty
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