C.S. Lewis spent two years at a school he never got over
Updated: 1 hour ago
Courage is the form of every virtue at the testing point.
C.S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters (1942)
C.S. Lewis spent two years, aged ten to twelve, at a school he later wrote about with something close to horror.
He called the headmaster "Oldie." The beatings were severe enough that another pupil's family brought a High Court action for assault. Arithmetic drill filled every day. Lewis's summary: "I was one of the last survivors, and left the ship only when she went down under us."
He grew into one of the twentieth century's great writers about courage. He had seen very clearly what its absence looks like from a child's desk.
The other half of his life matters just as much. Years later, J.R.R. Tolkien wrote about what Lewis had done for him: "The unpayable debt that I owe to him was not 'influence' as it is ordinarily understood, but sheer encouragement. He was for long my only audience."
Same man. One room taught him what fear does. Another friendship taught him what encouragement does.
The testing point is never the staff meeting where you write the values. It's when honoring a kid's "no" costs you the lesson. When including someone makes the activity genuinely worse. When a colleague says something about a student and the table laughs and you have two seconds.
Try this tomorrow
The move: say one sentence out loud this week. "I handled that badly. I'm going to do it differently."
In front of students. It teaches more about courage than any assembly, because it shows them what recovery looks like from the inside.
Children need adults who falter and name it. The flawless version teaches them nothing they can use.
The Kikori activity
Telestrations. Partners sit back to back with matching sets of blocks or drawing materials. One builds a pattern in 30 seconds and then describes it in words only while the other asks questions and tries to rebuild it, and they turn around to compare.
Grades 3 to 12 · two matching sets per pair, blocks or drawing supplies
The full version on Kikori has the facilitation script, the grade-band variations, the reflection questions and the slides to run it from.
Free Kikori account. No card.
In Kikori’s Experiential Connection Calendar, this activity sits under Speaking Up for Myself and Asking for Help.
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