"Education without values, as useful as it is, seems rather to make man a more clever devil"
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Lewis lands the line like a warning shot: schooling can sharpen the blade without asking what it’s for. The insult isn’t aimed at education’s usefulness; he grants that up front. It’s aimed at the modern temptation to treat usefulness as a moral alibi. If you can calculate, code, argue, and optimize, the culture often assumes you’re progressing. Lewis says you may simply be upgrading your capacity to do harm with style.
The phrase “clever devil” does the heavy lifting. “Clever” is a compliment in most classrooms; “devil” is a verdict. Put together, they expose a disquieting possibility: intelligence isn’t the opposite of wickedness, it’s a multiplier. Better reasoning can mean better rationalizations. Better literacy can mean better propaganda. Better science can mean better weapons. He’s not romanticizing ignorance; he’s diagnosing a mismatch between power and restraint.
Context matters. Lewis wrote in a century that watched educated societies industrialize cruelty: bureaucratic efficiency, scientific prestige, and national mythmaking fused into mass violence. He also wrote against the rising confidence that moral questions could be bracketed as “subjective” while technical knowledge remained “objective.” That split is the subtext here: values aren’t decorative add-ons to an otherwise complete education; they’re the steering mechanism.
The intent is conservative in the literal sense: conserve the idea that character formation is part of learning. Lewis’s fear isn’t that people will know too much; it’s that they’ll know precisely enough to get away with anything.
The phrase “clever devil” does the heavy lifting. “Clever” is a compliment in most classrooms; “devil” is a verdict. Put together, they expose a disquieting possibility: intelligence isn’t the opposite of wickedness, it’s a multiplier. Better reasoning can mean better rationalizations. Better literacy can mean better propaganda. Better science can mean better weapons. He’s not romanticizing ignorance; he’s diagnosing a mismatch between power and restraint.
Context matters. Lewis wrote in a century that watched educated societies industrialize cruelty: bureaucratic efficiency, scientific prestige, and national mythmaking fused into mass violence. He also wrote against the rising confidence that moral questions could be bracketed as “subjective” while technical knowledge remained “objective.” That split is the subtext here: values aren’t decorative add-ons to an otherwise complete education; they’re the steering mechanism.
The intent is conservative in the literal sense: conserve the idea that character formation is part of learning. Lewis’s fear isn’t that people will know too much; it’s that they’ll know precisely enough to get away with anything.
Quote Details
| Topic | Ethics & Morality |
|---|---|
| Source | C. S. Lewis, The Abolition of Man (1943) — line appears in the book's concluding passage. |
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