The importance of mentors

Definition of a mentor:

Someone more mature who takes you seriously; who is easy to please, but hard to satisfy.

A good mentor, in whatever field, respects your contribution and appreciates what you bring to the table — he is easy to please. But he also has high expectations of you. He wants you to be and do better than you are — he is hard to satisfy because he calls you to greater things.

This combination is powerful. This is what parents are for. Parenthood should be the ultimate mentor relationship. First keep the child alive, but after that, more important than anything else is to be a mentor. To call your child, every day and always, to greater maturity — to call a girl to be a woman, a boy to be a man.

In older generations it may be that parents were prone to fail at the first half, they were not easy to please — in times and places when children are not taken seriously, or when they are delegated to be raised by someone else. But today, certainly in my own experience of the world, parents usually fail at the second half. They are not hard to satisfy, because they are not willing to expect anything at all. What they really want from their children is not maturity, or growth, but good feelings — and having expectations, which the children will fail consistently to meet (because they are learning) and which occasion disappointment, frustration, perhaps conflict — it just gets in the way. But if we want to be real parents, and not just child-minders, we should acknowledge our failures, repent, and try to do better. Always remember you are raising adults, not children.

Mentorship is also what teachers ought to be for, and do. Teach specific skills, yes, but also be mentors. One virtue of the school system is to expose you to many potential mentors, more than a tutorial or apprenticeship. But it guarantees that these will not bear too much fruit: by jamming each child together with twenty others so that teachers become dominated by crowd-control, and have to apply arbitrary and capricious authority to manage it (though now lack of authority seems the greater problem); and by giving students only a few hours or minutes of time with each teacher each day, and then shuffling them along next year to a new teacher...

Nowadays, we practically have to reach the level of grad student with a supervisor to have the chance for an extended, years-long, intensive mentor-pupil relationship.

Parents need to give this serious thought. In educating our children, our priority should be to set up situations in which these mentor relationships can arise and flourish. This means intensive one-on-one time, with an adult of good character, over several years if possible — and the adult should take the child seriously, and at the same time expect a lot of him. This is good for learning skills but also for building character, maturity, wholeness, and happiness.

The example of C.S. Lewis is instructive: read his autobiography Surprised by Joy, and listen to how he talks about ‘Smewgy’ (ch. 7), and observe what an exemplary mentor this teacher was:

Smewgy was ‘beyond expectation, beyond hope’. He first taught me the right sensuality of poetry, how it should be savoured and mouthed in solitude. Nor had I ever met before perfect courtesy in a teacher. It had nothing to do with softness; Smewgy could be very severe, but it was the severity of a judge, weighty and measured, without taunting. He made us a unity by his good manners. He always addressed us as ‘gentlemen’ and the possibility of behaving otherwise seemed thus to be ruled out from the beginning. On a hot day, when he had given us permission to remove our coats, he asked our permission before removing his gown. His manner was perfect: no familiarity, no hostility, no threadbare humour; mutual respect; decorum.

Thus, even had he taught us nothing else, to be in Smewgy’s form was to be in a measure ennobled.

But of course, Lewis had a mentor of even greater moment, W.T. Kirkpatrick, ‘the Great Knock’ (ch. 9), his tutor from 1914–17, the last years of school before he went to the trenches and then up to Oxford.

If ever a man came near to being a purely logical entity, that man was Kirk. The idea that human beings should exercise their vocal organs for any purpose except that of communicating or discovering truth was to him preposterous. The most casual remark was taken as a summons to disputation.

Some boys would not have liked it; to me it was red beef and strong beer. Here was talk that was really about something. Here was a man who thought not about you but about what you said. No doubt I snorted and bridled a little at some of my tossings; but, taking it all in all, I loved the treatment. After being knocked down sufficiently often I began to know a few guards and blows, and to put on intellectual muscle. In the end, unless I flatter myself, I became a not contemptible sparring partner. It was a great day when the man who had so long been engaged in exposing my vagueness at last cautioned me against the dangers of excessive subtlety.

I think Lewis does not flatter himself: the respect was mutual. One can see the other side of the friendship in Kirkpatrick’s letter to Lewis’s father, upon his receiving a scholarship to Oxford:

What could I have done with Clive if he had not been gifted with literary taste and the moral virtue of perseverance? Those moral qualities which though less obvious and striking than the intellectual, are equally necessary for the accomplishment of any great object in life — I mean fixity of purpose, determination of character, persevering energy. These are the qualities that carried him through. I did not create them, and if they had not been there, I could not have accomplished anything.

As a dialectician, an intellectual disputant, I shall miss him, and he will have no successor. Clive can hold his own in any discussion, and the higher the range of the conversation, the more he feels himself at home.

It’s plain that the potential for great achievement, literary and intellectual, was present in C.S. Lewis from the beginning. But how was that potential turned actual? Through Lewis’s mentors, in the great years when he was taught by Smewgy and Kirkpatrick and grew from a boy into a man — confident, persevering, ‘at home’ in the highest level of conversation.

If you examine your own life I think you will find that, like Lewis, your periods of greatest growth in maturity and happiness are associated somehow with a mentor. Certainly I find this in my own life. Mentors are crucial.