What 1943 book by C.S. Lewis argues that education should cultivate objective moral values?

C.S. Lewis’s 1943 book arguing for objective moral values is The Abolition of Man.

The work grew out of three lectures Lewis delivered at the University of Durham in February 1943. In them, he criticized an approach to education that treated moral judgments as merely subjective emotional reactions.

Lewis defended what he called the Tao, his term for a shared body of traditional moral principles found across cultures. He argued that abandoning such principles would not make humanity freer in a simple sense; instead, it could leave people vulnerable to manipulation by those who control education and technology.

The book is often grouped with Lewis’s Christian apologetic works, but it is also a compact work of moral philosophy and educational criticism. It should not be confused with Miracles, a 1947 book about supernatural belief, or The Great Divorce, a 1945 imaginative theological narrative.