“Education without values, as useful as it is, seems rather to make man a more clever devil.”

S. Michael Craven has this commentary on the Center for Christ & Culture website. He writes:

C. S. Lewis wrote, “Education without values, as useful as it is, seems rather to make man a more clever devil.” This point was echoed two years ago in a Dallas Morning News article under the apt heading, “All Brains, No Soul” (August, 20, 2006). The author, Thomas Hibbs, a philosopher and dean of the Honors College at Baylor University begins by quoting Plato’s Apology, in which Plato, quoting Socrates’ defense of himself at trial, says:

You are an Athenian, a citizen of the greatest city with the greatest reputation for both wisdom and power; are you not ashamed of your eagerness to possess as much wealth, reputation, and honors as possible, while you do not care nor give thought to wisdom or truth, or the best possible state of your soul?

Hibbs makes the point that we Americans are becoming like the Athenians Socrates is addressing, especially when it comes to the object and aim of higher education today.