our english Syllabus or a call to learning

At first glance, one can quickly tell that C.S. Lewis is less than enthusiastic about writing a syllabus and this comes out in the point he makes within the Syllabus itself. Namely as Lewis puts it, "Do not tell me that you would sooner have a nice composite menu of dishes from half the world drawn up for you. You are too old for that. It is time you learned to wrestle with nature for yourself... Our selection would be an effort to bind the future within our present knowledge and taste: nothing could be worse; it would be a kind of propaganda... Is it really true that you would prefer that to the run of your teeth over the whole country? Have you no incredulity, no skepticism, left?" By this Lewis, is using food in place of knowledge, which is an apt metaphor because food is nourishment for the body and knowledge is nourishment for the mind, to suggest that it would be wrong to write up a Syllabus that tells the student what he or she must learn, but that it would be far better to let the students each pursue his or her own interests and tendencies to learn, in this case, English.

This point of we as college students and, as Lewis calls us, mature humans should no longer be taught as we were in Grade school in which facts were thrown at us in lectures and very little real world applications or imagination was applied we simply regurgitated what was taught will little or no processing. Now as college students we should be pursuing our own interests in knowledge and processing it and finding meaning, not just accepting what we are told by "elder students" (as Lewis aptly calls them). This is not to say that we should not work with and spend time in classes, but rather that the classes themselves should be structured more with the exploration of the subject by both the "students" and the "teacher" so that they would be junior and senior partners, so to speak, in a collective attempt to better understand how the world works.

This throws a wrench in how many colleges and universities teach because the majority of classes, especially at the reshmen and Sophomore level, are taught as lecture with little or no laboratory experience. The even worse part is that more and more so the labs are being treated as do what I tell you lecture style classes than the co-operative learning amongst fellow students that should be occurring. This, Lewis argues, is merely vocational training. I have to hold with this sentiment because, while it can arguably lead to very applicable real world situations, the student is not learning because he desires to learn that subject matter necessarily, but the student is learning because the student is told that he or she must learn that and so the whole "education" is more of a job or vocation and not so much creating an "interesting and interested person" that Lewis says that education should be doing.