Our English Syllabus

In “Our English Syllabus,” C.S. Lewis weaves a beautiful essay about what schooling is and the pursuit of knowledge. What is the pursuit of knowledge you may ask? According to C. S. Lewis, it is the role of a student. It means that I, being a freshman, must be driven by a passionate and on fire heart to learn and let my mind be fed by its “natural food.” My first thought after reading this essay was that I would have loved to have read this last year, my senior year of high school. 

Everyone has different talents, different gifts, different desires so everyone finds different things that they may want to pursue. “One may want to know what happened a million years ago, another, what happens a million light-years away, a third, what is happening in his own table on the microscopic level. What is common to them all is the thirst for knowledge.” Temple Grandin touched home with me today. Born with autism, yet not letting that stop her, she has pursued knowledge in animal behavior. Though I don’t know her views on God, I do know that she is a good example of finding what she loves and what she is good at and learning as much as she can to the best of her ability. As Christians, we are called to “do all to the Glory of God.” Sadly, our world looks at someone born with a disability and  feels bad for them thinking that there is not much they can amount to. But having a sister born with a disability, I know for a fact this is not true. No matter who we are and what we were born with, we can all find something that we are excited learning about and do it to the best that we can, through Christ. 

“It may be disappointing to stop a story in the middle, but you can understand it as far as you have gone; you cannot understand it if you begin the in the middle.” One thing I have learned in life is that this is so true. It is a challenge for me to desire to pursue knowledge to the best that I can if I do not know everything about it from first to last. When you see two friends talking and then you decide to catch up with them, it is hard to understand the conversation that you walked into unless they start right back at the beginning. This is also true when it comes to the Bible. If I was reading the Bible for the first time and started in Matthew 1, everyone in Christ’s genealogy would be bringing up question marks in my mind - why the random women mentioned, is Jesus Christ important, who is Abraham? Like I can not know the depth of the love of God if I only just read from the New Testament, if I desire to know more about my major, I must pursue all the knowledge I can about it - not just what has been presently found out.