"Education without values, as useful as it is, seems rather to make man a more clever devil"
About this Quote
C. S. Lewis warns that knowledge and skill, detached from moral purpose, can amplify vice rather than restrain it. Education sharpens the mind; it does not, by itself, shape the heart. Tools, techniques, and credentials are moral force multipliers: they increase what a person can do, for better or worse. A clever fraudster can engineer more elaborate deceptions; a propaganda expert can manipulate more minds; a technologist can build more efficient instruments of control. Cleverness without conscience does not neutralize evil; it makes it more effective.
Lewis wrote during a century that saw breathtaking scientific advances alongside industrialized cruelty and totalitarian manipulation. In works like The Abolition of Man, he argued that modern education too often treats moral judgments as mere preferences, producing what he called men without chests: brilliant heads and disciplined appetites, but no trained affections to love what is good. He pointed to a shared moral core across cultures, the Tao, as an objective order of value to which human reason and desire should be trained. Without that grounding, education risks becoming an arms race of technique, severed from truth and goodness.
Values here are not partisan slogans or fashionable sentiments. They are the habits and virtues that align power with responsibility: honesty, justice, courage, humility, charity. Lewis concedes the usefulness of education; his sting is that usefulness is not the same as goodness. A set of skills needs a telos, a purpose worthy of the human person. Otherwise, intelligence becomes cunning, and progress becomes a faster slide in the wrong direction.
The warning feels acute in a world of big data, biotechnology, and artificial intelligence. The more leverage our tools give us, the more urgent it is that education form character as well as competence. A humane curriculum does not bolt ethics on as an afterthought; it weaves moral formation through the whole enterprise so that the cleverness we cultivate serves truth, safeguards dignity, and advances the common good.
Lewis wrote during a century that saw breathtaking scientific advances alongside industrialized cruelty and totalitarian manipulation. In works like The Abolition of Man, he argued that modern education too often treats moral judgments as mere preferences, producing what he called men without chests: brilliant heads and disciplined appetites, but no trained affections to love what is good. He pointed to a shared moral core across cultures, the Tao, as an objective order of value to which human reason and desire should be trained. Without that grounding, education risks becoming an arms race of technique, severed from truth and goodness.
Values here are not partisan slogans or fashionable sentiments. They are the habits and virtues that align power with responsibility: honesty, justice, courage, humility, charity. Lewis concedes the usefulness of education; his sting is that usefulness is not the same as goodness. A set of skills needs a telos, a purpose worthy of the human person. Otherwise, intelligence becomes cunning, and progress becomes a faster slide in the wrong direction.
The warning feels acute in a world of big data, biotechnology, and artificial intelligence. The more leverage our tools give us, the more urgent it is that education form character as well as competence. A humane curriculum does not bolt ethics on as an afterthought; it weaves moral formation through the whole enterprise so that the cleverness we cultivate serves truth, safeguards dignity, and advances the common good.
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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