The staff and Headmaster shared out teaching responsibilities, which centred on drilling the pupils in Latin, Greek, modern languages and mathematics in preparation for university.
At some point around this time, Kirkpatrick, who had operated the College on explicitly Christian lines, appears to have ceased to profess his faith.
The Belfast solicitor Albert Lewis retained fond memories of his year at Lurgan, but chose an Anglo-Irish pathway for his sons and had sent them successively to Malvern College in Worcestershire.
[1][2] Warnie Lewis, who had not performed well academically at Malvern, was intensively tutored in 1913-1914 for a place at Sandhurst, in line with the older son's ambition of joining the British colours.
These efforts were successful and he was entered into the British army establishment just before the start of World War I. Warnie's departure from Great Bookham in 1914 opened a place for C.S.
Kirkpatrick, who appears to have been baulked by the demands of his Headmastership and then by his private tutoring responsibilities from carrying out an ideal tutorial regime, chose to subject the younger Lewis to an unusually intense course of study that combined the so-called Great Books with philosophy of all ages up to the present.
Part of his goal, which he shared with Jack's fee-paying father Albert, was to help start the likely lad on a course that would create a significant scholar of the 20th century.
Lewis saw had become a stern, ex-Calvinistic "rationalist of the old high and dry nineteenth-century type" with a strong bent toward formal logic, and he sought to transmit this worldview to his pupil.
[1][2] Lewis's autobiography, Surprised by Joy (1955), conveys rueful comments to indicate the author's disbelief that a good-faith reader could understand his delight at the intellectual training provided by the Kirkpatrick tutorship.