"The beginning, the middle, and the end in all these matters is good education and proper training; and I say it is this which leads on and helps towards moral excellence and towards happiness." Plutarch, The Education of Children.
"It is stated by Hecato and by Apollonius of Tyre in his first book on Zeno that he consulted the oracle to know what he should do to attain the best life, and that the God's response was that he should take on the complexion of the dead. Whereupon, perceiving what he meant, he studied ancient authors." --Diogenes Laertius, Zeno
". . . so that we may acquire a habit of mind that is not sophistic or bent on acquiring mere information, but one that is deeply ingrained and philosophic, as we may do if we believe that right listening is the beginning of right living . . . For the mind does not require filling like a bottle but rather like wood, it only requires kindling to ignite in it an impulse to think independently and a burning desire for the truth." Plutarch, On Listening to Lectures.
"It should be a general rule to keep the young away from the association with base men; for they carry away something of their badness . . . . If you dwell with a lame man, you will learn to limp. . . . I say again they ought to cling to the uncorrupted and sound education, and to withdraw their sons as far away as possible from the nonsense of ostentatious public discourse. For to please the multitude is to displease the wise." --Plutarch, The Education of Children.
"I readily return to that subject of our absurd educational system; its aim has been to make us, not good and wise, but learned; and it has succeeded. It has not taught us to follow and embrace Virtue or Wisdom, but has impressed upon us their derivation and etymology. . . . a good education changes one's outlook and character . . . who was ever affected in that way by our education?" Miguel de Montaigne
"But the chief function of the separate colleges at Oxford is to provide different focuses of thought. The mind of humanity is very various, full of strange outcrops and unexpected elaborations and differences of emphasis and conflicts which sometimes become harmonies and sometimes remain forever as polar tests of strength. Therefore it needs variety in which to express itself. One single organization, with one single unified structure, is probably a good thing for making money but not for thinking thoughts or making works of art. No man is as great as the Logos, the voice of reason." -Gilbert Highet, Oxford Press
"Hence, instead of Man Thinking, we have the bookworm. Hence, the book-learned class, who value books, as such; not as related to nature and the human constitution, but as making a sort of Third Estate with the world and the soul. Hence, the restorers of readings, the emendators, the bibliomaniacs of all degrees." Ralph Waldo Emerson, The American Scholar
"The first distemper of learning, is where men study words and not matter." --Francis Bacon.
Old, learned, respectable bald heads
Edit and annotate the lines
That young men, tossing on their beds
Rhymed out in love's despair
To flatter beauty's ignorant ear
All wear the carpet with their shoes;
All think what their neighbor thinks;
All know the man their neighbor knows.
Lord what would they say
Did their Cattallus walk their way?
--W.B. Yeats
"[N]othing literary can come from the present ways of the professionally literary in American Universities. It is much the same in the Scottish. Everything is research for the sake of erudition. No one is taught to value himself for nice perception and cultivated taste. Knowledge knowledge. Why literature is the next thing to religion in which as you know or believe an ounce of faith is worth all the theology ever written. Sight and insight, give us those." --Robert Frost
"And I didn't much care for the universities. I don't like the bureaucratization of literature which goes on there, or history. So I've been sharply critical of them. Now they realize the game is over, there are no longer voluntary readers, very few of them, they are dying out. And the universities want to at least keep some part of literary culture alive - usually the wrong parts, since they have no ability in telling what's what."--Gore Vidal
How beautifully it works, with a little mechanism; nay, almost makes mechanism for itself! These Professors in the Nameless [University] lived with ease, with safety, by a mere Reputation, constructed in past times, and then too with no great effort, by quite another class of persons. Which Reputation, like a strong, brisk-going undershot wheel, sunk into the general current, bade fair, with only a little annual repainting on their part, to hold long together, and of its own accord assiduously grind for them. . . . It was to be remarked that though by title and diploma, Professor der Allerly-Wissenshaft, or as we should say in English, 'Professor of Things in General,' [Teufelsdrockh] had never delivered any course . . . to all appearances, the enlightened Government of Weisnichtwo, in founding their New University, imagined they had done enough, 'if in 'times like ours, . . when all things are, rapidly or slowly, resolving themselves into Chaos, a Professorship of this kind had been established whereby as occassion called, the task of bodying somewhat forth again from such Chaos might be, even slightly, facilitated. . . . [T]hat actual lectures should be held, and public classes for the Science of Things in General they doubtless considered premature; on which ground too they had only established the Professorship, nowise endowed it; so that Teufelsdrockh, 'recommended by the highest names,' had been promoted thereby to a name merely." Thomas Carlyle, Sartor Resartus.
To get him started on the routine climb
That brought him to this eminence in time?
But now he has become one of his betters.
The dissertation and the discipline.
The eyes are spectacled, the hair is thin,
He is a dangerous committeeman.
He diets on, for daily bill of fare,
The blood of Keats, the mind of poor John Clare;
Within his range, he cannot be surprised.
It troubled him through all his early days.
But now he has the system beat both ways;
He publishes and perishes at once.
--Howard Nemerov
"The literary critic as I imagine him . . . is a specialist, defined and limited by the traditions of his craft . . . Samuel Goldwyn once said in reponse to someone who asked him why his movies were not more concerned with important social issues, 'If I wanted to send a message I'd use Western Union.' I say, if you want to send a message that will be heard beyond the academy, get out of it. Or, if I may adapt a patriotic slogan, 'the academy--love it or leave it. . . . [To justify itself to tuition paying parents and wealthy alumni the University should] hire lobbyists . . . publicity seeking types who are always thinking of ways to grab huge hunks of newspaper space and air time and fill it with celebrations of the university so compelling that millions of Americans will go to bed thankful that the Duke University English department are assuring the survival and improvement of Western civilization" --Stanley Fish, Professional Correctness.
"It requires a considerable sacrifice on the part of a specialist to admit that other specialties may contribute to education, and may even contribute so much that the attention given to his speciality should be reduced. This is particularly true in a country in which the specialist may not have achieved a liberal education himself and has to take statements of its value on faith." -Robert Maynard Hutchins, Some Observations on American Education
We seem to have forgotten that the expression 'a liberal education' originally meant among the Romans one worthy of free men; while the learning of trades and professions by which to get your livelihood merely was considered worthy of slaves only." --Thoreau, Last Days of John Brown
"In our hurried world too little value is attached to the part of the connoisseur and dilettante . . . . . The application of scholarly standards to the judgment of works of art certainly helped to clear away the sentimental undergrowth which had grown up in the wake of the gifted amateur; but nowadays, as was almost certain to happen, the very critics who did the necessary clearing have come to recognize that, their task once done, there remains the imponderable something, the very soul of the work contemplated, and that this something may be felt and registered by certain cultivated sensibilities, whether or not they have been disciplined by technical training." --Edith Wharton, Looking Backward
"As long ago as 1911 William James bitterly attacked what he called the PhD octopus. He asked, 'will any one pretend for a moment that the Doctor's degree is a guarantee that its posessor will be successful as a teacher? ' He has not received an answer; but the PhD goes rolling on and has even penetrated the shores of Britain." Robert Maynard Hutchins, Some Observations on American Education
"[College] is a period of hard work and yet of freedom in the old sense of freedom to do the mind's work without the constraint of external demands. . . . Initially the concept of 'research' was not suspected to contain the breakdown of communication among scholars which it has since engendered. [Daniel Coit] Gilman, the architect of the research university, personally labored in a number of ways to preserve the conversation among specialists in different fields. . . Today, such conversation among the experts has notoriously collapsed, and there is no present hope that it can be restored on a large scale. . . . [For a generalist to survive among specialists requires a conciliatory attitude:] No one could respect and envy the expert in a single field as the liberal scholar does; he regards his insular competance, perhaps, as a wandering sailor dreams of terra firma, and yet he prefers the waves and continues to sail." Thomas K. Simpson, in Robert A. Goldwin, ed., Higher Education and Modern Democracy The Crisis of the Few and the Many.
"[Mr. Mumford] said that we do not want served up to us the writer's rejected garbage. He had no doubt shuddered at the thought--which is likely to trouble any careful writer--that all his early notes and drafts might survive and fall into the hands of the MLA editors or be handed over to those of the young Ph.D. candidates, who could only benefit from then--the brighter ones-- by becoming convinced of the absurdity of our oppressive Ph.D. system of which we would have been well rid if, at the time of the First World War, when we were renaming our hamburgers Salisbury Steak and our sauerkraut Liberty Cabbage, we had decided to scrap it as a German atrocity. The indiscriminate greed for this literary garbage on the part of the universities is a sign of the academic pedantry on which American Lit. has been stranded." Edmund Wilson, "The Fruits of the MLA,"
"One hears tales at Oxford of how Jowett, the translator of Plato (with the help of Swinburne and of his students), used to thunder against 'research' at Oxford." Irwin Edman, Philosopher's Holiday.
"To an American the English educational system seems extraordinarily casual . . . Ph.D. worship in American universities and even in jerk-water colleges has destroyed casualness and substituted Ph.D. theses of German methodicalness and pedestrian turgidity for books of brightness. The average Ph.D. thesis is nothing but a transfer of bones from one graveyard to another. . . Education courses [are] designed by their 'unctuous elaboration of the obvious' to stultify any mind subjected to them-- courses politically useful, however, to the professors who give them, for they are thus kept in jobs . . . ." " --J. Frank Dobie, A Texan in England.
With numerous exceptions, academicians the world over are a Ladies of Shalotttish kind of people looking at the reflection of life in a looking glass instead of diving into the stream of life itself. . . A majority of them distrust vitality and are 'fit to live with maiden aunts and keep tame rabbits'. . . Yet, witness, I stand in bareheaded salute to all genuine scholars, of all creeds and tempers. They are the preservers and fertilizers of civilization down the ages." --J. Frank Dobie, A Texan in England.
"I was told by a distinguished teacher when I left for a year's travel and study abroad, 'Remember, a professor of philosophy studies philosophy. A philosopher studies life.' He failed to add that if a philosopher studies life scrupulously enough, he will have to reflect on what it means, and he will find himself, willy nilly, studying some of the things we discussed, perhaps poorly, after very poor dinners [at Oxford]." Irwin Edman, Philosopher's Holiday.
"Brain for brain the best [American] Rhodes Scholars were as good as the men who get firsts at Oxford, but these two sets of equals aside, the English students were much more intellectual because they had read more . . . they were ready to discourse and dispute on the books they had read, not read about, and they acquired the habit of reading. Courses, that curse of American non-intellectual university life, don't exist there. So much depends on a system that had its origin in the days when relatively few went to the university, and you could afford that kind of system, but it became clear to me that intellectually, in the actual manifestation of intellectual power, the English lads were better than the Americans. Emotionally, they were much more innocent." --Justice Felix Frankfurter.
"In many American school systems, colleges and universities there are standing committees that are supposed to be continuously engaged in the revision of the curriculumn. There is a fairly general belief that one man's opinion in this field is likely to be as good as another's, and that the way to discover which is best is to try them all. This is conformable to the pragmatic spirit of the country. . . American education is for everybody. It is not for the professional classes, or for the intellectuals, or for those who do not have to work for a living. It is for everybody. . . There never was a leisure class in America, except for a short time in a small part of the country. . . When the colonists of New England left the mother country they left the idea of a leisure class, and the education for it, behind them. They retained the ideals, the substance, and the methods of English education, which was in those days the privilege of the aristocracy, but they opened it to everybody. . . . Tocqueville thought that the greater or lesser possibility of subsisting without labor was the necessary boundary of intellectual improvement. . . In eighteenth-century England, when there were only about 200,000 voters, when political life was little but a contest between competing oligarchies, the education of the members of those oligarchies was the only politically significant education." --Robert Maynard Hutchins, Some Observations on American Education
"For the lucky few able to go to the right schools and universities, postwar England was still a small and self-contained society where everybody knew everybody else." Gore Vidal
"Let us cast away once for all those vague notions of enlightenment and culture, which make them appear as some sort of ornamental accessory for the life of leisure. . . . Culture is an indispensable element of life, a dimension of our existence, as much a part of man as his hands. True there is such thing as man without hands; but that is no longer simply man; it is man crippled. The same is to be said of life without culture, only in a much more fundamental sense. It is a life crippled, false." --Jose Ortega y Gasset, Mission of the University
"[One] delightful aspect of learning, that you discovered it was possible to misbehave and be rewarded--but only if you associated with aristocrats. No wonder they were so relaxed. They were rarely punished. . . .My conviction is that if anyone invented a system to educate without effort--merely by giving a sugar coated pill--that would be closer to Huxley's dream of a 'Brave New World' than to present-day motion picture realities. So many pictures loosely called 'educational' are really 'informative' or 'propaganda' pictures. Education is a privilege that cannot be got without effort." Sheilah Graham, College of One [from a lecture on Hollywood that her lover F. Scott Fitzgerald helped her write].
"The status which came from college attendance has been diluted. The college student is no longer one of the happy few he is one of the frustated many. . . Today's student cannot afford not to go to college if he has middle-class career aspirations; college is as necessary to him as secondary schooling and has not much more standing than secondary schooling had a generation ago." Martin Mayerson, in Robert A. Goldwin, ed., Higher Education and Modern Democracy The Crisis of the Few and the Many
" The 'monstrous regiment' of the emancipated: young women taught by their elders to despise the kitchen and the linen room, and to substitute the acquiring of university degrees for the more complex art of civilized living . . . I mourn more than ever the extinction of the household arts. [C]old storage, deplorable as it is, has done far less harm to the home than the Higher Education" --Edith Wharton, Looking Backward
"But the better among us see the insufficiency of popular aims, and begin to yearn for something other than a life of politics, newspapers, and financial enterprise. They desire to know and love the best that is known, and they are willing to be poor and obscure, if they may but gain entrance into this higher world. . . The best in life and literature is seen to be such only by those who have made themselves worthy for the heavenly vision; and once we have learned to love the few real books of the world, or rather what in these few is eternally true and beautiful we breathe the atmosphere of the intellectual life. . . And so there are individuals--and they are born to teach and rule--for whom to live is to grow . . . their education is never finished, their development is never complete; their work is never done. . . . Natural endowments are not equal; but the chief cause of inequality lies in the unequal efforts which men make to develop their endowments." John L. Spalding [Bishop of Peoria] Education and the Higher Life
"Liberal education will then consist in studying with the proper care the great books which the greatest minds have left behind--a study in which the more experienced pupils assist the less experienced pupils, including the beginnners." Leo Strauss, Liberal Education and Mass Democracy, in [of course, the middle of] Robert Goldwin, ed., Higher Education and Modern Democracy, The Crisis of the Few and the Many.
". . . it is obvious that the study of great books cannot be confined to the texts traditionally labelled 'works of political theory.' The poets, the dramatists, the theologians, the scientists (especially insofar as they have transcended the narrow and artificial limits of so much contemporary science) must be attended to with painstaking care. The study of great books is necessarily, then, in tension--I would say, in a fruitful and invigorating tension--with the artificially exagerated boundaries of specialization that so unfortunately sunder the contemporaneous 'university' into a kind of congeries of intellectual ghettoes." --Thomas Pangle, The Ennobling of Democracy.
"We are, in fact, in the midst of an educational revolution caused by the dying away of the classical impulse which has dominated European thought since the time of the Rennaissance. . . I am not referring to the mere teaching of a little more or a little less of Latin and Greek. What I mean is the loss of that sustained reference to classical literature for the sake of finding in it expression of our best thoughts on all subjects. . . Nobody with any sense can confront a class for long without discovering that all sound teaching is concerned with definite, accurate achievements on the part of the pupils. In view of this difficulty . . . the advantage of education based on the classical languages is that every step definite aims are placed before the learner. . . [A]nd in addition to all this, the classical languages possess the supreme merit that great ideas are simultaneously represented to the mind." --Alfred North Whitehead, A Philosopher Looks at Science
"But, if we scrutinize the programs of instruction more closely, we discover that the student is nearly always required, apart from his professional apprenticeship, and his research, to take some courses of a general character philosophy, history. . . . It takes no great acumen to recognize in this requirement the last, miserable residue of something more imposing and more meaningful . . . . In its present form it serves no end at all; one must trace it back to some other age of its evolution in order to find whole and active what exists today only as a residual stump. . . . [T]he fact is that if we go back to the medieval epoch in which the university was created, we see clearly that the relic before us is the humble remains of what when constituted higher education, proper and entire. The medieval university does no research. It is very little concerned with professions. All is 'general culture' theology, philosophy, 'arts.' But what is called 'general culture' today was something very different for the Middle Ages. It was not an ornament for the mind or a training of character. It was, on the contrary the system of ideas, concerning the world and humanity which the man of that time possessed. It was, consequently the repertory of convictions which became the effective guide of his existence." Jose Ortega y Gasset, Mission of the University
"The most characteristic solution is to give up and under the guise of freedom, let the students do anything they please, construct any kind of program they like. . . All of these plans are declarations of bankruptcy on the part of the universities, a renunciation of their function of teaching the students and an avoidance of the difficulties involved in making the decisions as to what the student ought to know." Thomas K. Simpson, in Robert A. Goldwin, ed., Higher Education and Modern Democracy The Crisis of the Few and the Many
"We cannot expect aliveness and involvement when we are busy inculcating docility and compliance. On the other hand I have no great confidence in students who wish to pick their own teachers or design their own curriculumn. There are more exciting things to learn than students are aware of; more disciplines than they know, which, after tedium, break forth into delight; more good books to read than they have yet heard of; more of the past that is relevant than they suspect; and more in 'useless' knowledge than they, at their age, can possibly understand. Peter Prescott, A World of Our Own
The Mahometans begin their instruction in philosophy, with the doctrine that nothing exists of which the contrary may not be affirmed. Thus they practice the minds of youth, by giving them the task of detecting and expressing the opposite of every propositions; from which great adroitness in thinking and speaking is sure to arise." Conversations of Goethe
"[Of the universities]: I have seen spirits destroyed; youthful lovers of literature turned into pedants, some of them now quite respected in intellectual circles; lovers of wisdom petrified into classroom exponents of doctrine; passionate revolutionaries turned into reactionaries, or, perhaps even more sadly, passionless liberals. I have seen the world become deadened by the flesh, and the letter kill the spirit. . . . [George] was an incarnation, not unengaging, of the eternal malcontent on campus, the perpetual, surprised discoverer of the way in which the machinery of the university, like the machinery of other enterprises, defeats its purposes by swallowing them. So had many a mystic of the Church of which George was still a communicant rebelled against the eccelsiastical organization . . . I had seen two or three of the liveliest minds and most imaginative tempers among students who had fled from, or been exiled from, the academy because they felt as George now felt and had adapted themselves less than he. And I had also seen what had in time become of most of them. It requires a very strong character, tenacity of purpose, and singleness of aim to work in isolation, especially when one is young. Liveliness of mind and acuteness of feeling often disintegrate into nothingness without the discipline of a period of orientation in principles, in intellectual handling of facts . . ." Irwin Edman, Philosopher's Holiday
[Ken, a homeless person] lived near the university a long time . . . . He had come to believe he belonged to an arcane community of true scholars. The members of this esoteric brotherhood comprised the true University, as opposed to the apparent university, which was composed of various sophists, charlatans, and hacks. Unfortunately these latter were vested with temporal authority at the university and the true scholars were reduced to skulking about . . . [Homeless persons 'shop' by dumpster diving, and college dorms offer some of the best pizza-filled dumpsters--] College students also discard their papers. I am horrified to discover the kind of paper that now merits an A in an undergraduate course." Lars Eighner, Travels With Lizbeth: Three Years On The Road And On The Street
"I cannot imagine that there is a really excellent student (recall that 'to excel' comes from the Latin verb 'to rise above the rest' ) who has any sensitivity to the feelings of others, to whom excellence, and its free exercise, has not been now or then a problem. If you raise your hand with the right answer all the time, how will the slower people feel? If your papers are always the best, how will the others feel? Who among you has not, from decency or embarrassment, held back, restrained your own freedom to function, so as to avoid standing out? Who has not sacrificed being outstanding for a sense of egalitarian propriety? And who has not felt, just a little, the dangers of acting at full throttle, freely shooting ahead of the others?" Dean Eva Brann of St. John's College, Democractic Distinction.
"Inequalities of mind and body are so established by God Almighty in his constitution of Human Nature that no art or policy can ever plane them down to a level." John Adams, letter to Thomas Jefferson, July 13, 1813
[Jefferson's Bill for the General Diffusion of Learning] " . . . proposed to divide every county into wards of 5 or 6 miles square, like [Adams'] townships; to establish in each ward a free school for reading, writing and common arithmetic; to provide for the annual selection of the best subjects from these schools who might receive at the public expense a higher degree of education at a district school; and from these district schools to select a certain number of the most promising subjects to be completed at University, where all the useful sciences should be taught. Worth and genius would thus have been sought out from every condition of life, and compleatly prepared by education for defeating the competition of wealth and birth for public trusts." Thomas Jefferson, letter to John Adams, Oct. 13, 1813.
"What if all ponds were shallow? Would it not react on the minds of men? . . . It is remarkable how easily and insensibly we all into a particular route, and make a beaten track for ourselves. . . . The surface of the earth is soft and impressible by the feet of men; and so with the paths that the mind travels." Henry David Thoreau, Walden.
"The power of schools to develop culture and intelligence in the young was challenged by increasingly potent 'avenues of escape' from mental exertion after World War II . . . The avenues of escape from mental exertion have multiplied remarkably. . . The central job of school is to emancipate the young not just from ignorance but from a sterile pop culture of mental passivity . . . . More schools need to define themselves proudly as places apart from the mass culture, defenders of children's safety, and cultivators of their intellects. . . .While they bring in the underprivileged, one aspect of diversity prep schools avoid is those youngsters 'with virtually no interest in education.'" Arthur G. Powell, Lessons from Privilege: The American Prep School Tradition
"Learning which is discontinued when one leaves school is for the most part wasted effort . . . The surest way to defeat learning is to place it in charge of those whose own education has stopped." Everett Dean Martin, The Meaning of a Liberal Education.
"For what purpose have we in teaching them, than that they should not always need to be taught?" --Quintillian
"A good mind has a good separator in it and can peck the good from the bad in all it absorbs." F. Scott Fitzgerald
"What Plato has thought, he may think; what a saint has felt; he may feel; what at any time has befallen any man, he can understand . . . But the vast majority of men though by nature all related to and having access to this world of thought, yet live and act mainly in quite another region, that is, in the apparent world of the senses, acting with simple reference to their actual relations, that is, as mortals, as fathers, as tradesmen, as householders. They go in and out providing for their body and taking council of their eyes and ears quite unembarassed by any skeptical fanatics." --Ralph Waldo Emerson.
"College graduates give their children an almost completely different set of names than do working-class parents . . . different social classes draw from different sources in picking names. Popular TV characters explain most of the changes in popularity among high-school dropouts and high-school graduates . . . while people with some college or an advanced degree tend toward more traditional names, chosen from family history, the Bible, or literature." Marc Fisher, The Names People Play, Washington Post Dec. 30, 1996, D2 [citing the research of Cleveland Evans].
[Mathew Arnold] ". . . meant that certain mental traits are sufficiently characteristic of educated minds generally to be the distinguishing marks which differentiates them from the uneducated. To be sure it is a thankless task to call attention to such traits, and no one who does it may expect to be very popular, but sometimes, when the culture of a nation is in danger, it has to be done. Arnold has in mind characters like Socrates, Erasmus, Montaigne--no muddled-head, opinionated or narrow-minded men, but men who had attained clarity of thought and the insight which pierces the glamor of things and the follies of men, and yet could speak and write without bitterness or rancor or malice." Everett Dean Martin, The Meaning of a Liberal Education.
"An educated man stands, as it were, in the midst of a boundless arsenal and magazine, filed with all the weapons and engines which man's skill has been able to devise from the earliest times; and he works, accordingly, with a strength borrowed from all past ages." Thomas Carlyle, An Essay on Robert Burns
"I am fully aware that the fact of my not being a man of letters may cause certain arrogant persons to think that they may with reason censure me, alleging that I am a man ignorant of book learning. Foolish folk! . . . They strut about puffed up and pompous, decked out and adorned not with their own labors but by those of others, and they will not even allow me my own. And if they despise me who am an inventor how much more should blame be given to themselves, who are not inventors but trumpeters and reciters of the works of others?" Leonardo da Vinci, Notebooks
