Educating the Moral Imagination: The Fantasy Literature of George MacDonald, C.S. Lewis, and Madeline L'Engle
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This thesis explores the education of the moral imagination through the fantasy literature of George MacDonald and two authors he directly influenced, C.S. Lewis, and Madeleine L'Engle. Though moral education is the oldest curriculum, and considered by many, from Plato to the present, to be the ultimate aim in education, much of academic literary discourse and contemporary classroom practice ignores moral education. We excel in reading literature through various theoretical lenses, and teach for intellectual and stylistic excellence but, ironically, ignore too often literature's most serious purpose: to teach virtue. To the extent that this is so, we are failing to equip children and young adults with what they need most: literary nourishment that facilitates the development of spiritual well-being. This inquiry is addressed to such a gap in the curriculum: the need to educate the imagination with healing stories of courage and hope, and the need to do so with an imaginative pedagogy that encourages moral fortitude. Unlike rationalistic discourse, which alienates learners, I argue that MacDonald, Lewis, and L'Engle nurture the ethical human being with an education into the "feeling intellect." I describe how they achieve this in a subversion of the cultural privileging of the traditionally viewed "masculine" values of reason, autonomy, and egotistical power and, concomitantly, by a celebration of the traditionally viewed "feminine" values of imagination, interdependence, and humility. In the six chapters that make up the body of this work, I explore how MacDonald, Lewis, and L'Engle nurture the moral imagination: one, their ethical pattern of humility as grounded in the moral imagination of the Christian Gospel, particularly as articulated by John Milton, and that of William Wordsworth; two, the childlike heroic in George MacDonald; three, the "feminine" heroic in C.S. Lewis; four, the mythic understanding of heroism in Madeleine L'Engle; five, theoretical curriculum implications for the imaginative education of these three authors; and six, practical pedagogical interpretations of teaching this heroic fantasy literature in the classroom. Together, these chapters are intended to help teachers explore educating the moral imagination through fantasy literature.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.006 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.004 | 0.022 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.006 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".