What was the title of C.S. Lewis’s 1943 book arguing that education must develop objective moral values?

The Abolition of Man was C.S. Lewis’s 1943 book arguing that education must develop objective moral values.

The work grew from three lectures delivered at the University of Durham in 1943. Lewis criticized forms of education that, in his view, reduced value judgments to mere personal emotions. He defended what he called the Tao, a term for a cross-cultural body of basic moral principles.

The book argues that abandoning objective value would not produce genuine freedom. Instead, it could leave human beings shaped by technological power and controlled impulses, a condition Lewis describes through the book’s warning about “man’s conquest of nature.”

The Abolition of Man is a philosophical and educational work, not a science-fiction novel. Its title is sometimes mistaken for a political manifesto or a direct sequel to Mere Christianity, but its structure is a short series of connected lectures.