03-20-2008, 06:41 PM
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Because, according to Lewis, learning and education are different, and imply a different dynamic between students and faculty. Quote:
You have doubtless been told—but it can hardly be repeated too often—that our colleges at Oxford were founded not in order to teach the young but in order to support masters of arts. In their original institutions they are homes not for teaching but for the pursuit of knowledge; and their original nature is witnessed by the brute fact that hardly any college in Oxford is financially dependent on undergraduates' fees, and that most colleges are content if they do not love over the undergraduate. A school without pupils would cease to be a school; a college without undergraduates would be as much as a college as ever, would perhaps be more a college.
It follows that the university student is essentially a different person from the school pupil. He is not a candidate for humanity, he is, in theory, already human. He is not a patient; nor is his tutor an operator who is doing something to him. The student is, or ought to be, a young man who is already beginning to follow learning for its own sake, and who attaches himself to an older student, not precisely to be taught, but to pick up what he can. From the very beginning the two ought to be fellow students. And that means they ought not to be thinking about each other but about the subject. The schoolmaster must think about the pupil: everything he says is said to improve the boy's character or open his mind—the schoolmaster is there to make the pupil a 'good' man. And the pupil must think about the master. Obedience is one of the virtues he has come to him to learn; his motive for reading one book and neglecting another must constantly be that he was told to.
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