In Lewis’s era, intellectuals professed all reality to be subject to the rational mind. Emotion was seen as a threat to the supremacy of rationality. To Lewis’s horror, educators in the 1940s were deciding that “the best thing they [could] do is to fortify the minds of young people against emotion” (Abolition of Man, Broadman & Holman Publishers, 27). (These days, we suffer the opposite: intellectuals promote emotion as the sole compass by which humans should conduct themselves. Emotion is king. But that is for another post.)
Read MoreIf I do become a mother one day, that means that, at some point, I will be dealing with a middle school child. And you can bet your shiny iPhone 6s that I will be bribing the heck out of that kid to read pages rather than screens, because the stories children internalize are the stories that shape their character -- especially in middle school.
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