Our English Syllabus: Socialization versus Individualization

In his work "Our English Syllabus" C.S. Lewis approaches education and the learning process from a very critical angle. He is highly critical of vocational training and even goes so far as to say "education is essentially for freemen and vocational training for slaves." This is a rather bold statement to make, especially when you look at the way our society values education. Specificity and focus in a field tend to help you achieve a higher status in that particular job. Even at Calvin College there are engineering and nursing programs designed to give the students a focused education in a specific field. That said, Calvin also requires some core classes designed to stretch the students minds and broaden their horizon. However, Calvin is the exception and not the rule when it comes to this approach. Regardless of our societies view on learning, I am inclined to agree with Lewis. That education and the pursuit of knowledge is far greater than any one subject of learning.
Something I found interesting in this piece was it's similarity to another paper I had read a while back by a philosopher named Richard Rorty. In Rorty's work he discusses education in two forms, socialization and individualization. Socialization is the process of education that takes place from kindergarten through 12th grade. During this process we learn all the basic rules of society. We learn customs, cultural roles, and basic information that then prepares us for our next stage of life, individualization. Individualization then takes place in college, or in "the school of life" --depending on life choices-- where we learn to question the society around us and pursue the knowledge that we love most. This combination tactic provides a powerful arsenal of information to the lover of wisdom. I think that Lewis would agree with this for several reasons. The first just being the fact that his essay seems most focused towards college students then anyone younger. Second, Lewis says that "a perfect study of anything requires a knowledge about everything." And third, when Lewis speaks of higher education he describes them as "homes not for teaching but for the pursuit of knowledge." An idea that is addressed through the dual approach of socialization and individualization. It is true that we cannot learn everything there is to know, and I would agree completely that we should focus on what we love, but we need to have a basis to begin with so that we can pursue wisdom with guidance rather than a wild chase with no real idea where we are going.
Think about selecting your classes for the Spring semester. Yes, there were some core classes you had to pick and probably a class that you needed for your major you would have otherwise passed on. But, how did you pick the majority of your other classes? We need the process of socialization so we learn what lights a fire inside of us. On the board today under the questions it said "Vocation vs. Education vs. My calling/ability." It seems to me that we discover our calling and our ability through the socialization process. We go through trial and error until we find our passion. Then we follow that knowledge during the education process. "The proper question for a freshman is not "what will do me most good?" but "what do I most want to know?" From this process we can then pursue our vocation-the deep calling in our life for the purpose that God has for us.
The final thought I have on this is from the last page of Lewis' piece when he says "How do you know that in that very river which I would exclude as poisonous the fish you specially want, the undiscovered fish, is waiting? And you would never find it if you let us select. Our selection would be an effort to bind the future within our present knowledge and taste: nothing more could come out than we had put in." This in my opinion is the strongest argument for why the individualization process is so important. C.S. Lewis explains that "one of the most dangerous errors instilled into us by nineteenth-century progressive optimism is the idea that civilization is automatically bound to increase and spread." This is certainly true, it is naive to think that we are guaranteed to always progress in the right direction, or that we have found the perfect place where we are now. We will always need people cutting against the grain, doing things that they find interesting, always searching deeper and questioning things around them. Without the individualization process we would become stagnant and our society would never progress, or even worse without someone to question what we do we would regress. With that said, we do need the socialization process to teach children what the world they live in is like. We cannot have 5 year old anarchists protesting against their bedtimes because they question everything. But there comes a time, when maturity and mental cognition are complete that we should find our own calling and learn about what we have a passion for, so that we can question society and discover knowledge that no one had looked for before.