education & the university12 quotes

“The university’s task is thus well-defined, if not easy to carry out or even keep in mind. It is, in the first place, always to maintain the permanent questions front and center. This it does primarily by preserving—by keeping alive—the works of those who best addressed these questions.”

“Human beings are what they learn to become within an already ongoing world of ideas which they discover in their unsought entrance to it. From the outset, each of us encounters a world presented to us by others as something already understood, compelling us to seek to understand what others seem already to understand.”

Πολυμαθίη νόον οὐ διδάσκει.

“The learning of many things teaches not understanding.”

“Any idea of education that is not connected to an idea of formation—of habitation in virtue, inculcation in tradition, veneration of the high and noble—is unavoidably impoverished.”

“A culture comprises unfinished intellectual and emotional journeyings, expeditions now abandoned but known to us in the tattered maps left behind by the explorers; it is composed of lighthearted adventures, of relationships invented and explored in exploit or in drama, of myths and stories and poems expressing fragments of human self-understanding, of gods worshipped, of responses to the mutability of the world and of encounters with death. And it reaches us, as it reached generations before ours, not as an accumulation of human achievements we are called upon to accept, but as a manifold of invitations to look, to listen, and to reflect.”

“A university will have ceased to exist when its learning has degenerated into what is now called research, when its teaching has become mere instruction and occupies the whole of an undergraduate’s time, and when those who came to be taught come, not in search of their intellectual fortune but with a vitality so unroused or so exhausted that they wish only to be provided with a serviceable moral and intellectual outfit; when they come with no understanding of the manners of conversation but desire only a qualification for earning a living or a certificate to let them in on the exploitation of the world.”

“Every human being is born an heir to an inheritance to which he can succeed only in a process of learning.”

“To have command over the languages of our civilization is, not to know the rules of their grammar, but to have the opportunity of a syntax and a vocabulary, rich in fine distinctions, in which to think for oneself.”

“We may listen to what a man has to say, but unless we overhear in it a mind at work and can detect the idiom of thought, we have understood nothing.”

“What every man is born an heir to is an inheritance of human achievement; an inheritance of feelings, emotions, images, visions, thoughts, beliefs, ideas, understandings, intellectual and practical enterprises, languages, relationships, organizations, canons and maxims of conduct, procedures, rituals, skills, works of art, books, musical compositions, tools, artifacts and utensils—in short, what Dilthey called geistige Welt.”

“You have to understand. The longer you wait to build skills, the harder life pushes you to settle for something beneath your potential capabilities. Education is a race against premature convergence.”

“Only through imitation do we develop toward originality.”