This is a continuation of the post on the task of the modern educator.

And I get it, it’s controversial.

But because of posts like this and this – I truly do not know how you can separate proper ethics from proper education.

For if you do divide them, you are making value judgments with no foundation to stand on.

Value judgments follow from values, not from nothing.

Does that make sense?

St Augustine defines virtue as ordo amoris, the ordinate condition of the affections in which every object is accorded that kind of degree of love which is appropriate to it. Aristotle says that the aim of education is to make the pupil like and dislike what he ought. When the age for reflective thought comes, the pupil who has been thus trained in ‘ordinate affections’ or ‘just sentiments’ will easily find the first principles in Ethics; but to the corrupt man they will never be visible at all and he can make no progress in that science. Plato before him had said the same. The little human animal will not at first have the right responses. It must be trained to feel pleasure, liking, disgust, and hatred at those things which really are pleasant, likeable, disgusting and hateful.

-C.S. Lewis, The Abolition Of Man (Amazon)