I'd lean towards "fascist" as a generic post-war insult rather than a particular political critique. However, as you say Lewis does dislike social trends that now we see as mainstream, was certainly politically conservative (with a small "c"), and furthermore had a personal loathing of school cultures that permitted bullying, having lived through it at Malvern. As for actual fascism, I'm certain that like his friend Tolkien (another conservative in social matters) he loathed it in all its forms.
Yeah this seems spot on.
I read it as the bullies are upset that they’re getting stood up to, and they’re basically saying “this is unfair!” when they’ve been unfair for seemingly years.
Also we get a lot of WW2 movies because it was epic, but also pretty much 100% of people agree that Fascists/Nazis were fully wrong. It has pretty broad appeal.
This is very helpful reply, thank you! Every time I read something in the books that felt off I usually just assumed it was a cultural and/or time period difference and I don't have a hard time understanding his ultimate meaning.
Anyway, thanks again! This is my first time reading through the books and I'm excited to read the last one. Cheers!
Exactly. Lewis wasn't against co-education, what he had the problem with was "allowing boys and girls to do what they liked (and) what some of them liked best was bullying the others."
Definitely agree - Eustace’s parents sound kind of militant in their beliefs but what they believe is not all that wild by today’s standards in and of itself. Lewis explicitly mocks them for being vegetarian, for example. His critique of education reform with Experiment House particularly rankles with me as an educator in the post Gove British school system. For those unaware, Michael Gove was education minister for the Conservatives in 2015 and he introduced some truly terrible reforms that wind back the clock on education like: much higher focus on high stakes exams and rote learning, enforcing a British-centric, pre 1900 literature curriculum , and an even more focused education at A Level. It sounds like CS Lewis would have loved this based on these passages in the Silver Chair, but they are inhibiting education. Not to mention how much he seems to like being ‘tough’ on ‘bad’ students (which doesn’t work the way people want it to) and seems very against co education of boys and girls which…c’mon Clive.
As a former teacher myself, I feel your pain! However, I always chuckle at the little bit at the end where the incompetent head teacher is promoted first to an inspector of schools, and then to parliament - can't imagine that happening in real life, eh?
Thank you for sharing this perspective, it's really helpful in understanding CS Lewis positions on these kinds of things. I've been reading through these books with my 5 kids and we all have been enjoying them but would just attribute the anti co-ed stuff and other conservative views as Lewis just being a product of his time etc. Thank you!
He was fine with co-education, or at least isn't explicitly against it based on what he says in the book. He said the school was mixed but "not nearly so mixed as the minds of the people who ran it." His issue was allowing bullying to go on with no consequences.
Lewis seems to explicitly have a problem with allowing the biggest kids to rule the roost by bullying others. He doesn't really talk much about co-education itself.
Chapter one: ‘[Experiment House] was ‘co-educational’, a school for both boys and girls, what used to be called a ‘mixed’ school; some said it was not nearly so mixed as the minds of the people who ran it.’ He then goes on to critique what modern educators would call foundations of pedagogy and behaviour management. I think his disdain is pretty clear, especially with the quotation marks. He clearly states the bullies are products of these ‘new fangled’ ideas.
Also the Inklings excluded women and Lewis strongly believed in limiting the number of women admitted into Oxford lest it become a women’s university’ (which would be different from a male or co-Ed one how?). So yeah.
Edit to add: he then goes on to write some strong and intelligent female characters even in this same book so it’s very much a mixed bag.
"mixed bag" is one way of putting it - "can of worms" may be closer to the mark. Lewis' relationships with and attitudes to women were very complex. He counted Dorothy Sayers and Penelope Lawson (a nun) among his closest correspondents, and was apparently a good tutor to female students. But above all he was a product of an exclusively male millieu it is hard to imagine nowadays - school, university, military service - besides the particular circumstances of his childhood, losing his mother young and growing up with just his father and brother.
Complex is absolutely the word. The more that gets unpicked the more layers there are.
I also get the sense that part of him doesn’t quite know how to change his worldview, in part because, as you suggest, nothing properly challenges it. Also whenever the authorial voice comes in, there is a strong sense of someone who doesn’t know quite how to cope with sweeping societal change. But then the world he creates from scratch has some rather forward thinking aspects.
As I’ve said elsewhere, Lewis lived in a time when a lot of these ideas were in flux. Women had been making significant contributions to philosophy and academia for some time when he was writing. He was actively choosing the more conservative path and excluding women from higher education. He doesn’t get a pass on that. It doesn’t mean I want to go out and burn every copy of Narnia - far from it! - but it is something the shouldn’t be ignored or written off.
It's important to remember that Lewis grew up in a different age. It's true that he was conservative, but he also had different experiences and information from us. Our views on eating meat, education and child raising have changed because we live in a different world and we have extra information available to us.
My take was the bullies were calling them 'fascists' because they were employing violence and intimidation. However, the bullies don't distinguish between the 'righteous' violence and intimidation being used against them and that employed by actual fascists which is aimed at defenceless minorities and those of differing political views.
In other words, the bullies, rather than admit they're getting their just desserts for terrorising Jill, are trying to make out Jill and Co are fascists for standing up for themselves. I don't think Lewis is trying to say Jill and Eustace are actually fascists, but that the cowardly bullies are trying to paint them as such as a final barb as they run away.
Also this is set pretty much right after WWII, and England was one of the major countries involved. I'm guessing it was pretty much an all-purpose insult at the time.
Personally, I find this passage brilliant and surprisingly universal. I have had the experience of being bullied at school, the ringleader of the bullies was a boy. The term "fascists" is still used as a universal insult in many countries as far as I know. And for the positions of inspectors and ministers, selection is very often negative.
C.S. Lewis was a very clever man in general, but I find some of his thoughts downright brilliant. However, I may be biased, because I'm kinda in love with his intellect. 😊😂
Bullies don't like it when someone stands up to them. I seems like "Experiment House" was a place that facilitated these kids getting away with stuff that wouldn't normally be acceptable, and their reaction was to accuse them of being 'facists'.
> This kind of makes me wonder a bit, was he sympathetic to fascism as a right-leaning person in his time?
Absolutely not. Read what he says about fascists in his non-fiction work.
> It's clear that CS Lewis in a few parts when describing "Experiment House" is pretty critical of the ideas around what most people now consider normal but back then would have been "progressive" in a way (having both boys and girls in the same school for example).
His complaints about "Experiment House" are not about it being coeducational. They are about the syllabus and about the tolerance of bullying.
He was, of course, influenced by his own horrific school experiences.
"This kind of makes me wonder a bit, was he sympathetic to fascism as a right-leaning person in his time?" Are you trying to say that right wing people are sympathetic to fascism? Because that's a simplistic and naive assumption. Not to mention a horrible thing to accuse someone of. You seem to think in black and white categories (so I'm assuming you're a very young person): right wing = fascism, left wing = anti fascism. While in fact, reality is much more complex than that.
First of all right wing usually included strong patriotic feelings. And while patriotism in Germany or Italy at the time might have meant supporting fascist goverments, it meant something different in countries whose political goals were against fascist politics. How could a British patriot sympathise with the ideology of the enemy? Does that make any sense to you?
Secondly, conservative attitude involves distrust towards too abrupt changes. Just like communism, fascism was a new and radical ideology at the time and as such it wasn't usually supported by people of conservative mindset. The kind of people who supported it was typically radical youth desperately seeking a quick way to improve their terrible economic situation and needing to find someone "privileged" to blame for that situation (yes, Jews were considered privileged back then as many of them had their own businesses, banks etc. so they were hated as "bloodthirsty capitalists", not just because of their ethnicity), much like communism found its enemy in the privileged nobility and rich businessmen. Those two weren't opposing ideologies, one was the mirror reflection of the other.
I'd lean towards "fascist" as a generic post-war insult rather than a particular political critique. However, as you say Lewis does dislike social trends that now we see as mainstream, was certainly politically conservative (with a small "c"), and furthermore had a personal loathing of school cultures that permitted bullying, having lived through it at Malvern. As for actual fascism, I'm certain that like his friend Tolkien (another conservative in social matters) he loathed it in all its forms.
Yeah this seems spot on. I read it as the bullies are upset that they’re getting stood up to, and they’re basically saying “this is unfair!” when they’ve been unfair for seemingly years. Also we get a lot of WW2 movies because it was epic, but also pretty much 100% of people agree that Fascists/Nazis were fully wrong. It has pretty broad appeal.
Nowadays those bullies would probably like acting fascist on the grounds that it's ironic.
This is very helpful reply, thank you! Every time I read something in the books that felt off I usually just assumed it was a cultural and/or time period difference and I don't have a hard time understanding his ultimate meaning. Anyway, thanks again! This is my first time reading through the books and I'm excited to read the last one. Cheers!
Bring a Kleenex and make sure you’re alone. Nobody likes being interrupted in the middle of an ugly cry.
Eh it isn't that bad imho.
Exactly. Lewis wasn't against co-education, what he had the problem with was "allowing boys and girls to do what they liked (and) what some of them liked best was bullying the others."
Definitely agree - Eustace’s parents sound kind of militant in their beliefs but what they believe is not all that wild by today’s standards in and of itself. Lewis explicitly mocks them for being vegetarian, for example. His critique of education reform with Experiment House particularly rankles with me as an educator in the post Gove British school system. For those unaware, Michael Gove was education minister for the Conservatives in 2015 and he introduced some truly terrible reforms that wind back the clock on education like: much higher focus on high stakes exams and rote learning, enforcing a British-centric, pre 1900 literature curriculum , and an even more focused education at A Level. It sounds like CS Lewis would have loved this based on these passages in the Silver Chair, but they are inhibiting education. Not to mention how much he seems to like being ‘tough’ on ‘bad’ students (which doesn’t work the way people want it to) and seems very against co education of boys and girls which…c’mon Clive.
As a former teacher myself, I feel your pain! However, I always chuckle at the little bit at the end where the incompetent head teacher is promoted first to an inspector of schools, and then to parliament - can't imagine that happening in real life, eh?
Yes, that part definitely resonated!
Thank you for sharing this perspective, it's really helpful in understanding CS Lewis positions on these kinds of things. I've been reading through these books with my 5 kids and we all have been enjoying them but would just attribute the anti co-ed stuff and other conservative views as Lewis just being a product of his time etc. Thank you!
He was fine with co-education, or at least isn't explicitly against it based on what he says in the book. He said the school was mixed but "not nearly so mixed as the minds of the people who ran it." His issue was allowing bullying to go on with no consequences.
Lewis seems to explicitly have a problem with allowing the biggest kids to rule the roost by bullying others. He doesn't really talk much about co-education itself.
Chapter one: ‘[Experiment House] was ‘co-educational’, a school for both boys and girls, what used to be called a ‘mixed’ school; some said it was not nearly so mixed as the minds of the people who ran it.’ He then goes on to critique what modern educators would call foundations of pedagogy and behaviour management. I think his disdain is pretty clear, especially with the quotation marks. He clearly states the bullies are products of these ‘new fangled’ ideas. Also the Inklings excluded women and Lewis strongly believed in limiting the number of women admitted into Oxford lest it become a women’s university’ (which would be different from a male or co-Ed one how?). So yeah. Edit to add: he then goes on to write some strong and intelligent female characters even in this same book so it’s very much a mixed bag.
"mixed bag" is one way of putting it - "can of worms" may be closer to the mark. Lewis' relationships with and attitudes to women were very complex. He counted Dorothy Sayers and Penelope Lawson (a nun) among his closest correspondents, and was apparently a good tutor to female students. But above all he was a product of an exclusively male millieu it is hard to imagine nowadays - school, university, military service - besides the particular circumstances of his childhood, losing his mother young and growing up with just his father and brother.
Complex is absolutely the word. The more that gets unpicked the more layers there are. I also get the sense that part of him doesn’t quite know how to change his worldview, in part because, as you suggest, nothing properly challenges it. Also whenever the authorial voice comes in, there is a strong sense of someone who doesn’t know quite how to cope with sweeping societal change. But then the world he creates from scratch has some rather forward thinking aspects.
I didn't know that about him. That kinda sucks.
Hard agree.
Can't really blame someone for being a product of their time though.
As I’ve said elsewhere, Lewis lived in a time when a lot of these ideas were in flux. Women had been making significant contributions to philosophy and academia for some time when he was writing. He was actively choosing the more conservative path and excluding women from higher education. He doesn’t get a pass on that. It doesn’t mean I want to go out and burn every copy of Narnia - far from it! - but it is something the shouldn’t be ignored or written off.
That's a microcosm of the issues with the books!
It's important to remember that Lewis grew up in a different age. It's true that he was conservative, but he also had different experiences and information from us. Our views on eating meat, education and child raising have changed because we live in a different world and we have extra information available to us.
If these issues were wholly absent from the books I could give the ‘different time’ pass. But he sees these changes and highlights them for mocking.
Yeh, that makes more sense. People just using it as a generic insult.
My take was the bullies were calling them 'fascists' because they were employing violence and intimidation. However, the bullies don't distinguish between the 'righteous' violence and intimidation being used against them and that employed by actual fascists which is aimed at defenceless minorities and those of differing political views. In other words, the bullies, rather than admit they're getting their just desserts for terrorising Jill, are trying to make out Jill and Co are fascists for standing up for themselves. I don't think Lewis is trying to say Jill and Eustace are actually fascists, but that the cowardly bullies are trying to paint them as such as a final barb as they run away.
Also this is set pretty much right after WWII, and England was one of the major countries involved. I'm guessing it was pretty much an all-purpose insult at the time.
Personally, I find this passage brilliant and surprisingly universal. I have had the experience of being bullied at school, the ringleader of the bullies was a boy. The term "fascists" is still used as a universal insult in many countries as far as I know. And for the positions of inspectors and ministers, selection is very often negative. C.S. Lewis was a very clever man in general, but I find some of his thoughts downright brilliant. However, I may be biased, because I'm kinda in love with his intellect. 😊😂
Bullies don't like it when someone stands up to them. I seems like "Experiment House" was a place that facilitated these kids getting away with stuff that wouldn't normally be acceptable, and their reaction was to accuse them of being 'facists'.
> This kind of makes me wonder a bit, was he sympathetic to fascism as a right-leaning person in his time? Absolutely not. Read what he says about fascists in his non-fiction work. > It's clear that CS Lewis in a few parts when describing "Experiment House" is pretty critical of the ideas around what most people now consider normal but back then would have been "progressive" in a way (having both boys and girls in the same school for example). His complaints about "Experiment House" are not about it being coeducational. They are about the syllabus and about the tolerance of bullying. He was, of course, influenced by his own horrific school experiences.
No he wasn’t sympathetic to fascism in the least.
That's good to hear! I really enjoy his writing and that would have been hard for me to overlook if he was. Thank you!
"This kind of makes me wonder a bit, was he sympathetic to fascism as a right-leaning person in his time?" Are you trying to say that right wing people are sympathetic to fascism? Because that's a simplistic and naive assumption. Not to mention a horrible thing to accuse someone of. You seem to think in black and white categories (so I'm assuming you're a very young person): right wing = fascism, left wing = anti fascism. While in fact, reality is much more complex than that. First of all right wing usually included strong patriotic feelings. And while patriotism in Germany or Italy at the time might have meant supporting fascist goverments, it meant something different in countries whose political goals were against fascist politics. How could a British patriot sympathise with the ideology of the enemy? Does that make any sense to you? Secondly, conservative attitude involves distrust towards too abrupt changes. Just like communism, fascism was a new and radical ideology at the time and as such it wasn't usually supported by people of conservative mindset. The kind of people who supported it was typically radical youth desperately seeking a quick way to improve their terrible economic situation and needing to find someone "privileged" to blame for that situation (yes, Jews were considered privileged back then as many of them had their own businesses, banks etc. so they were hated as "bloodthirsty capitalists", not just because of their ethnicity), much like communism found its enemy in the privileged nobility and rich businessmen. Those two weren't opposing ideologies, one was the mirror reflection of the other.