Somewhere along the way, we started training young people to be merely operators. We teach them to manage the machine, to run the system, to handle the tool that does the real work—and we measure their learning by how well they can retrieve what they need at the moment they need it. It is an efficient arrangement. It is also a strange one, because the things we most admire in a person—the capacity to think clearly when the air turns thick, to imagine, to judge well, to hold fast to what is true when someone is bending the meaning of words—none of these can be outsourced. They have to be formed.
That is an older word for what school was once for: formation. Not the acquisition of data, but the slow shaping of a soul—its memory, its loves, its capacity to perceive what is real. And there may be no better guide to recovering that vision than C.S. Lewis, who hid an entire philosophy of education inside stories we hand to children, and who knew that the adventure itself is the formative thing.
My guest today is Shannon Valenzuela, a writer, director, and producer working in the same imaginative tradition of Lewis, and an Affiliate Assistant Professor of Humanities at the University of Dallas. This past year she served as a Fellow of our Inklings Project—the McGrath Institute's fellowship that gathers educators from around the globe to read deeply in the company of Lewis, Tolkien, and the great sources behind them. We talk about what the Chronicles of Narnia teach us about forming the whole person, about memory and mastery and Aslan as the model teacher, and about where the Inklings Project is headed next—including a new fellowship opening to middle school and high school educators.
Follow-up Resources:
Learn more about the Inklings Project, which is currently inviting Middle and High School Educators to apply for its fellowship program by August 1, 2026
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