Screwtape on education

More C.S. Lewis from "Screwtape Proposes a Toast" in The World's Last Night and Other Essays. I promise I didn't copy this idea from Cindy, as I've been meaning to post it for two days, but it certainly is a striking coincidence, and if you read it, really does remind me of the current attitude towards education:

I hope, and believe, that each one of you has the same uneasiness tonight. Your career is before you. Hell expects and demands that it should be--as Mine was--one of unbroken success. If it is not, you know what awaits you.

I have no wish to reduce the wholesome and realistic element of terror, the unremitting anxiety, which must act as a lash and spur to your endeavors. How often you will envy the humans their faculty of sleep!

After that welcoming introduction, which reminds me of the way we treat our high school juniors, Screwtape gets down to details about the reason why souls in Hell these days are of such poor quality:

It would be vain to deny that the human souls on whose anguish we have been feasting tonight were of pretty poor quality...The difficulty lay in their very smallness and feebleness. Here were vermin so muddled in mind, so passively responsive to environment, that it was very hard to raise them to that level of clarity and deliberateness at which mortal sin becomes possible...They do not understand either the source or the real character of the prohibitions they are breaking. Their consciousness hardly exists apart from the social atmosphere that surrounds them. And of course we have contrived that their very language should be all smudge and blur...

Of course, Lewis eventually gets around to explaining how these muddled souls finally became capable of making a choice worth damnation, but that's a much more serious subject that makes me instead want to quote his book The Great Divorce. My point in posting these was merely to point out some parallels with education.