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"The first thing that the Will to Learn supposes is a
dissatisfaction with one's present state of opinion. There lies
the secret of why it is that our American universities are so
miserably insignificant. What have they done for the advance
of civilization? What is the great idea or where is [the] single
great man who can truly be said to be the product of an
American university? The English universities, rotting with
sloth as they always have, have nevertheless in the past given
birth to Locke and to Newton,
and in our time to Cayley,
Sylvester, and Clifford. The German universities have been
the light of the whole world. The medieval University
of
Bologna gave Europe
its system of law. The University
of
Paris and that despised
scholasticism took Abelard and
made him into Descartes. The reason was that they were
institutions of learning while ours are institutions for teaching.
In order that a man's whole heart may be in teaching he must
be thoroughly imbued with the vital importance and absolute
truth of what he has to teach; while in order that he may have
any measure of success in learning he must be penetrated
with a sense of the unsatisfactoriness of his present condition
of knowledge. The two attitudes are almost irreconcilable.
But just as it is not the self-righteous man who brings
multitudes to a sense of sin, but the man who is most deeply
conscious that he is himself a sinner, and it is only by a sense
of sin that men can escape its thraldom; so it is not the man,
who thinks he knows it all, that can bring other men to feel
their need of learning, and it is only a deep sense that one is
miserably ignorant that can spur one on in the toilsome path
of learning. That is why, to my very humble apprehension, it
cannot but seem that those admirable pedagogical methods
for which the American teacher is distinguished, are of little
more consequence than the cut of his coat that they surely
are as nothing compared with that fever for learning that
must consume the soul of the man who is to infect others
with the same apparent malady."
Charles Sanders Peirce, 1898
Essential Peirce, vol. 2, pp. 47-8.
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