| Sunday, April 19, 2009 10:42AM | | | | Learning the Love of Learning | Posted By: Boria Sax
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| Tags: Higher Education, Love of Learning, Cardinal Newman | For Socrates in the dialogues of Plato, learning had been a perpetual ecstasy. He scorned the Sophists, who wanted to place philosophy in the service of jurisprudence rather than truth and who charged money for their services. Socrates could charge his students nothing, for he desired almost nothing beyond the opportunity to question the learned and powerful. Christians may strive to imitate Jesus, but they would not want to be crucified. Scholars, similarly, may want to be like Socrates, but they would not like to live in poverty.
Anybody who hangs around an institution of higher education for a while will hear it said that "learning should be for its own sake." That may sound bizarre, old-fashioned, and even crazy, yet it is also strangely appealing. Today it is difficult to get people to do anything "for its own sake," even to take a walk in the park. And although universities may see themselves as following the Socratic tradition, they charge money for just about everything. But academics are used to anachronisms, and many accept this idea of disinterested investigation of truth (along with the faux-Gothic arches) as a phrase to invoke at convocations or graduations....
Continued at http://liberalarts.wabash.edu/cila/home.cfm?news_id=3470 | | | |
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