The complaint is, that
what you learn at [school] is of no use to you when you are grown up. . . . This
complaint has been answered over and over again; but it is for ever renewed,
and must for ever be patiently heard. At school you are not engaged so much in
acquiring knowledge as in making mental efforts under criticism. . . . What man
of thirty is there, that is doing business on the stock of knowledge acquired
at school? . . . A certain amount of knowledge you can indeed with average
faculties acquire so as to retain; nor need you regret the hours that you spent
on much that is forgotten, for the shadow of lost knowledge at least protects
you from many illusions.
But you go to a great
school not for knowledge so much as for arts and habits; for the habit of
attention, for the art of expression, for the art of assuming at a moment's
notice a new intellectual posture, for the art of entering quickly into other
person's thoughts, for the habit of submitting to censure and refutation, for
the art of indicating assent or dissent in graduated terms, for the habit of
regarding minute points of accuracy, for the habit of working out what is
possible in a given time, for taste, for discrimination, for mental courage and
mental soberness. Above all, you go to a great school for self-knowledge.
– William Johnson Cory (1851)