Curriculum for Excellence: The hollow victory of C.S. Lewis’ “men without chests”

DANNY KRUGER, Reform UK’s MP for East Wiltshire, credits reading C.S. Lewis with his conversion to Christianity. Most people know Lewis as the author of the books that introduced millions of children to Aslan, the White Witch, and the wardrobe that led to another world. But Lewis was also one of the twentieth century’s most penetrating critics of modern education.

Lewis’ 1943 essay The Abolition of Man warned that progressive education was systematically destroying students’ capacity for moral judgement. He called the result “men without chests” – people with intellectual tools and appetites, but no character formation to bridge the two. Lewis explained something that I’d watched unfold for years: why the system fails, and why that failure was built into its design from the start.

Lewis began with a seemingly minor example: a school textbook that taught students that the sublimity of a waterfall was just a projection of the observer’s feelings. The textbook’s authors thought they were teaching critical thinking. Lewis saw they were teaching something more dangerous: that all values are subjective, that there’s no objective truth to appeal to, and that moral judgements are just expressions of personal preference. One might describe this as the cul-de-sac of liberalism.

such education produces people who can critique everything but believe in nothing

This might seem abstract, but Lewis understood where it led. If beauty is merely subjective, so is goodness. If we can’t say a waterfall is objectively sublime, we can’t say courage is objectively good or cruelty objectively evil. Education built on this foundation doesn’t produce free-thinking students, it produces people who can critique everything but believe in nothing, who have intellectual capacity but no moral formation.

Lewis called them “men without chests.” The “head” represents intellect and reason. The “belly” represents appetite and desire. The “chest” represents courage, honour, proper shame, moral sensibility – all those things we call virtues that make us capable of choosing the good even when it’s difficult. Modern education, Lewis argued, trains the head and indulges the belly while systematically starving the chest.

Eighty years later, Scottish education is a textbook example of Lewis’s critique. Little wonder that his warning has been described as prophetic.

Scotland’s Curriculum for Excellence explicitly rejects the teaching of objective knowledge in favour of vague skills and critical thinking. The predictable result? Declining literacy and numeracy. Students who can “critique” texts that they can’t actually read. Young people who are able to question every standard but have no basis for judgement. Children taught that all viewpoints are equally valid, that authority is suspect, and that truth is constructed. They have heads (intellectual tools) and bellies (desire for credentials and status), but no chests – no formation in reality, no submission to objective standards, no developed capacity for judgement.

It is argued, however, by the architects of CfE, that the fault isn’t with the curriculum but with its implementation. At the risk of pushing the similarity too far, I’ve heard the same ridiculous excuse made for Soviet Russia. I’ve never actually settled on whether the argument is deluded, disingenuous or both. Because in both cases the fly was in the ointment from the very beginning. Politically motivated progressivists simply pushed at an open door.

The failures aren’t accidental. Lewis foresaw that educational systems built on subjective values would produce two classes: the masses (“men without chests”) who are intellectually equipped but morally unformed, and the elite planners (“the Conditioners”) who shape education according to their own ideological preferences.

It is a mistake, I believe, to regard the Conditioners as having anything to do with education. The purpose of education, writes E.D. Hirsch Jr., is to promote literacy as an enabling competence.

Curriculum for Excellence is progressive ideology dressed as pedagogy

The purpose of the Conditioners is cultural politics. Their aim is to change the content and values of our British culture. Curriculum for Excellence is progressive ideology dressed as pedagogy.

The Conditioners don’t care about the children or their education: the children are simply the means to the Conditioners’ ends. And in Scotland, we see this all too clearly. The far-left progressivist wing of the SNP has effectively weaponized education for its political ends. The result is a population increasingly dependent on expert guidance, susceptible to emotional manipulation, estranged from Scotland’s actual history and capable of neither self-reliance nor genuine critical thought. It is devastating for the young people who have been subjected to it.

Lewis’s diagnosis points to the cure. Education must recover three things Scotland has abandoned:

First, objective knowledge. Students need to master actual content – historical facts, geographical knowledge, mathematical procedures, scientific principles. Skills divorced from knowledge are empty posturing.

Second, legitimate authority. Teachers must be authorities who transmit wisdom, not facilitators who enable discovery. The idea that students can construct their own knowledge is more fantasy than Narnia.

Third, character formation. Children need formation by those who know more than they do. Education isn’t just about filling heads with information. It is about forming chests capable of moral judgement. This requires submission to standards larger than the self, recognition of objective truth, and cultivation of virtues like courage, honesty, and humility before reality.

Danny Kruger discovered through Lewis that reality is bigger than we’re taught to see. Scottish students deserve the same discovery. They deserve an education that forms their character, not just their opinions. An education that teaches them that truth exists, not just perspectives. And they deserve an education that prepares them to build and maintain civilization, not just critique it.

Lewis saw it coming. Scottish education has proven him right. The man who gave us Narnia understood what Scotland’s educators have forgotten: some things are really true, some things are really good, and the best of things are really beautiful. Until we recover what he defended, we will continue further up and further into the cul-de-sac producing graduates who can critique everything and build nothing.