Acquiring arts and habits

In the last few weeks, there has been some debate in the opinion pages of The Daily Princetonian about whether students, on the whole, are assigned too much reading. This is not a new debate. The "homework problem" — as I shall call it — is a recurring theme that is either ignored or complained about in vain. If this column has a point, it is simply this: how much homework should be expected of us, on average, is a legitimate question worthy of debate.

In a recent column, Ryan Salvatore '02 quotes politics professor Gary Bass to this effect: "For the rest of your lives, you guys are going to be treated as if you got an extraordinary education — including being offered many privileges because of that. We're trying to make sure that you really do get that kind of education." Precisely. So the right question to ask is: What is an extraordinary education?

I can't think of a better answer to this question than the one given by William Johnson Cory (1823-1892), a British schoolmaster and lesser poet of the later 19th century: "[Y]ou go to a great school not so much for knowledge 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 position, for the art of entering quickly into another 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 art of working out what is possible in a given time, for taste, for discrimination, for mental courage, and for mental soberness."

The point of this, as I see it, is that the accumulation of knowledge is secondary to learning various arts and habits that compel us to think for ourselves. Knowledge is all but worthless if we don't know what to do with it. Schopenhauer had this in mind when he wrote: "As the biggest library if it is in disorder is not as useful as a small but well-arranged one, so you may accumulate a vast amount of knowledge but it will be of far less value to you than a much smaller amount if you have not thought it over for yourself." This also reminds me of an old aphorism: "Catch a fish for a man, and you have fed him for a day. But teach a man how to fish, and you have fed him for a lifetime." When we are assigned reams and reams of reading — whether it is mundane, inspiring or classic — our intellectual hunger may be satiated for a week, a month or even a year. But if we can be taught how to read, criticize and think for ourselves, then we have been given an intellectual ability that will last for the rest of our lives.

How do we learn how to think for ourselves? And I don't mean this in a trivial sense: of course we all know how to think about what we read. This is Princeton. But there are ways of thinking about and manipulating conceptual information that cannot be gleaned from reading great works alone. Knowledge by itself is a necessary but insufficient component of wisdom. The question then becomes: How do we learn how to become wise? We can have intimate knowledge of wise thoughts and fail to be wise ourselves. I believe the answer lies in a transformation of conscious awareness into unconscious knowledge — attaining the arts and habits that Cory so beautifully describes.

The current thinking about a great education, as Gary Bass' words suggest, is that if we read enough, if we could just know all the great thinkers or ideas in a field of inquiry, then we too will know how to be great. But practice never makes perfect, and it is even less useful without appropriate instruction. At Princeton we have incredible professors who can teach us and encourage us in the right way, but this can't be done through reading alone. I suppose this places the burden of learning how to think for ourselves on participating in precepts, writing papers and talking with peers. I know that any arts and habits I have picked up have come from these aspects of Princeton. Therefore, if the homework problem hinders these other avenues of learning — where, in my opinion, the real value of a Princeton education resides — then it is a serious problem that demands solutions, not scorn. Jeff Wolf is a philosophy major from Chevy Chase, MD. He can be reached at jeffwolf@princeton.edu.