What we and our children can learn from great literature.

• Author: Flaherty, Micheal
• Position: Education - Essay

AT THE END of C.S. Lewis' The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, Peter, Susan, Edmund, and Lucy assume their rightful thrones as kings and queens of Narnia. Lewis dedicates only one sentence to describing how they governed during the Golden Age of Namia, but it is interesting to hear his summary of their most important accomplishments. Lewis tells us that they "made good laws and kept the peace and saved good trees from being cut down and liberated young dwarfs and young satyrs from being sent to school and generally stopped busybodies and interferers and encouraged ordinary people who wanted to live and let live."

It is interesting to note that the first item of business after keeping the peace and protecting the environment was abolishing school. Namia thus is the first kingdom where home-schooling not only is encouraged, but required. However, I think Lewis was talking less about the institution of school and more about what was being taught there. When it came to what was being taught, Lewis thought that stories made all of the difference.

Lewis begins The Voyage of the Dawn Treader with a memorable introduction of a new character: "There once was a boy named Eustace Clarence Scrubbs, and he almost deserved it." In introducing us to Scrubbs, Lewis believes the best way for the reader to understand him is to know the kinds of books he read. "He liked books if they were books of information and had pictures of grain elevators or of fat foreign children doing exercises in model schools." In other words, he did not have time for the types of stories that Lewis adored--stories about heroism, knights, and talking animals.

As a result, Scrubbs is at a significant disadvantage when he first arrives in Namia and finds himself in a dragon's lair. "Most of us know what we should expect to find in a dragon's lair," Lewis writes, "but, as I said before, Eustace had read only the wrong books. They had a lot to say about exports and imports and governments and drains, but they were weak on dragons."

The situation gets more dire when the dragon begins to stir: "Something was crawling. Worse still, something was coming out of the cave. Edmund or Lucy or you would have recognized it at once, but Eustace had read none of the right books."

Clearly, Lewis is telling us something about more than dragons and talking mice. He is giving us a simple instruction: you are what you read. We are shaped and influenced by the books that we read. They prepare us for more than interesting conversations--they actually prepare us to face real crises that we encounter in life. Few people would dispute this simple statement, so let us ask a simple related question: what are we reading today?

The short answer is: not much. The National Endowment for the Arts released a report entitled "Reading at Risk." You may be familiar with its findings, but allow me to repeat the headline: for the first...