University Education

If there is anybody here who belongs to the teaching staff of the University, I hope they will not my saying - what is, after all, hardly better than a platitude - that the things we learn in such places are not the things that are taught us. What is handed on to us by our lecturers is taken down in a note-book, and languishes there until examination time comes round; it has not become a part of our mental furniture. It is sealed off; for the most part, even from memory. What we are learning at the University is something quite different; we acquire it by a kind of unconscious absorption. Arguments we have had over a cup of coffee, points of view we have been introduced to at a debating society, or in reading the reviews - serious reviews, such as we feel bound to read now that we are intellectuals; stray pieces of information we have picked up on the radio, or even at the cinema; all these penetrate under the skin, or say, if you will, they are the germs floating in the air which we breathe in without knowing it. You make heroes among your fellow students, and copy their handwriting, their dress, their behaviour. You go on your travels in the vacation, attend conferences, meet people who impress you by their greater knowledge of the world. All that is, in the larger sense, your education. Your friends say, at the end of three years, how altered you are. But they are not thinking of lectures.

Ronald Knox (1888-1957) in a sermon to Catholic undergraduates on the feast of St. Therese. Over the years Knox was a student, tutor and chaplain at Oxford.