Education Quote by C. S. Lewis

Lewis flips the usual fantasy of education as conquest. “Cut down jungles” evokes the imperial image of hacking through wild overgrowth: the teacher as civilizer, the student as unruly nature, knowledge as a machete. It’s a deliberately bracing metaphor for a model of schooling that treats young minds as dangerous because they’re alive - too intuitive, too imaginative, too inclined to grow in the “wrong” direction. Lewis doesn’t just reject that posture; he ridicules it by choosing a verb (“cut down”) that sounds both violent and joyless.

“Irrigate deserts” turns the educator into a cultivator of conditions rather than a manager of weeds. The desert is not chaotic; it’s barren. The problem isn’t too much life, it’s too little: apathy, cynicism, the inability to care, the habit of shrugging. The teacher’s job, then, is not mainly correction but nourishment - to make it possible for something to take root. The subtext is moral psychology: you can’t argue people into valuing what they’ve been trained to treat as optional. You have to restore the capacity for response.

Context matters. Lewis, writing in the shadow of mechanized war and modern bureaucracies, was wary of education that produces “clever men without chests” - technicians of reasoning unmoored from trained affections. This line is a compact manifesto against a sterilizing modernity: stop pruning; start giving water. The real crisis isn’t excess imagination. It’s drought.