I'm with you, PotW, on slideyfoot's remarks. Funny thing, the "modern" thinking that Lewis slammed is being attacked by the very type of folks he would take issue with now--postmoderns.
Odd how "no corporal punishment" must be interpreted as meaning that Lewis preferred the idea of "beatings" for school children (check out Surprised by Joy to see what Lewis really thinks about this practice).
Similarly, Lewis' apparent dislike for mixed gender schools must be interpreted as him saying that children cannot learn anything in a mixed environment--again, odd, since his main characters are always paired one-to-one in terms of gender, and the lessons they are constantly learning from one another are central to his plot lines. Perhaps, just perhaps, Lewis has something else in mind by this comment? On a side note, it is an interesting "trend" in North American education that many schools (which are outlawed from "indoctrinating" anyone in those pernicious Christian texts slideyfoot mentions) are returning to gender "segregation" (oh, that evil word!). Funny, it seems that students learn better in an environment that doesn't force them into constant sexual competition, pageantry, and sniping at one another. It has everything to do with respecting the dignity of the sexes and nothing to do with degredation of one or the other, or both.
As for Christian texts and indoctrinating people with them, it seems I am at a total loss there. I'm not sure where that assumption vis-a-vis the Experiment House comes from--I'd love to see it in the text. Yet I suppose the assumption is justified (even though in Surprised by Joy Lewis expresses his sense of reverence and indebtedness to the atheist tutors of his youth). Lewis is a Christian; perhaps writing from that perspective isn't to be suffered from any writer (even a dead one) anymore? Perhaps the longitude and latitude of lofty position of objectivity from which slideyfoot writes should be shared with us all that we may visit it. Oh wait, "objectivity" is that chimera of modernism, isn't it? And I thought whimsical creatures like that only roamed in Lewis' imagination...
It is often clearer from the internal evidence (content of writing) than from the external (age of writer) what ideological epoch authors hail from.
