The pleasure of learning

Why are you in college?

To get a job.

That answer is a popular one. Even as more Americans opt out of college, most undergraduates enroll for the promise of employment.

Of course, there are other purposes. Some think college makes good citizens or free thinkers or instills social and cultural awareness. Catholic theologian John Henry Newman believed college’s highest purpose was knowledge itself.

Perhaps the most audacious purpose was articulated by C.S. Lewis, who believed higher education exists for the pleasure of pursuing “higher intellectual activity.” In C.S. Lewis on Higher Education (Bloomsbury Academic 2023), Stewart Goetz, a philosophy professor at Ursinus College, unpacks Lewis’ ­assertion that pleasure is the ultimate purpose for going to college.

Essential to Lewis’ thinking is the distinction he makes between education and learning. The former is what happens in grade school, with a regimented curriculum that develops skills like writing, reading, and arithmetic. Learning is what happens after this foundation has been set.

College learning is not aimed at measuring skills or acquiring knowledge, in Lewis’ view. Instead, the goal is the pleasure of advanced intellectual exploration. No other reason is necessary for higher education.

It’s important to keep in mind here that Lewis understood pleasure as an inherent good. When experienced appropriately, pleasure mirrors the joy of heaven, and God is glorified when we experience it. The college experience brings pleasure when we explore the beauty and goodness of creation for the joy of understanding, “getting to know some part of reality, as it is in itself.”

With this purpose in mind, Lewis imagined a very different institution than the contemporary college. His ideal college is built around truth-­seeking, not instruction; meaningful intellectual inquiry, not the assessment of content. Faculty and students do the same sorts of things at different levels of excellence, as both are pursuing pleasure through higher intellectual activity. A student is “attached to his tutor as to an older student to learn what he can, not to be taught.”

Beneath Goetz’s analysis of Lewis’ ideas lies a compelling critique of contemporary society. Goetz highlights our obsession with the practical and the useful, which Lewis associated with the “irrational animals.” In a letter to Arthur Greeves, Lewis worried that “the modern world is so desperately serious.” Everything we read, listen to, and study needs a purpose, a use, a role to play. This servile bent in our society makes it difficult to appreciate Lewis’ pedagogy. We no longer think pleasure is something that serious people should take seriously. Pleasure is reduced to entertainment, because there are jobs to do, careers to pursue, bills to pay, and children to raise, which leaves us little time to enjoy God’s creation.

Also, our society is motivated by what Lewis in The Screwtape Letters called “the altar of the Future.” Instead of daily dependence on God, we work to make our future (earthly) lives more secure. This “pursuit of the rainbow’s end” stirs anxiety and fear, while strangling our ability to enjoy what is good and true about reality.

Rather, it is “the Present,” Lewis insists, that holds “all duty, all grace, all knowledge, and all pleasure.” In Lewis’ pedagogy, a college is a fortress of the present, and to think about college as little more than job preparation threatens its true purpose.

Unfortunately, at a time when most Americans no longer read books for pleasure, Lewis’ pedagogy is likely to fall on deaf ears. But for people who take Lewis seriously, this book will challenge our understanding of higher education and the importance of deeper intellectual activity both to individuals and to society. The book invites a rethinking of what college is for, at a time when more and more people wonder whether American higher education is worth the cost.