Laudator Temporis Acti

M.L. Clarke, Greek Studies in England 1700-1830 (Cambridge: At the University Press, 1945), p. 33:

But perhaps the universities taught best by leaving the undergraduates alone. Johnson had a low opinion of the formal teaching at Pembroke, but he read widely by himself, and his reading included Greek, in particular Homer and Euripides.⁴ And in the same college a few years later we hear of a 'very sober little party, who amused themselves in the evening with reading Greek and drinking water';⁵ the authors they chose were those seldom read at school, such as Theophrastus, Epictetus and Phalaris. At Balliol in 1794 Southey was told by his tutor that he would learn nothing from his lectures and that he had better pursue his own studies; left to himself he used to rise at five in the morning to read Homer.⁶ Henry Fynes Clinton the chronologist, who was at Christ Church when it enjoyed a great reputation under Cyril Jackson, derived more advantage from discussions with friends than from his official teachers.⁷

4 Boswell, Life of Johnson (ed. Hill), I, p. 70.
5 Richard Graves, Recollections of William Shenstone, p. 13.
6 Life and Correspondence of Robert Southey (1859), I, p. 215.
7 Clinton, Literary Remains, p. 11.

Peter Brown, Journeys of the Mind: A Life in History (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2023), p. 164:

It was a commonplace among undergraduates at Oxford that we learned more from each other than we ever learned from any lectures or, even, from our tutors.

I cherish the memory of reading Plato's Apology of Socrates in Greek with my friend Tim Nagler on the steps of the Rotunda at the University of Virginia.

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From Shreevatsa:

I was reminded of this Sanskrit proverb:

ācāryāt pādam ādatte
pādaṃ śiṣyaḥ svamedhayā |
pādaṃ sabrahmacāribhyaḥ
pādaṃ kālakrameṇa ca || (variant: "pādaḥ kālena pacyate")

“One-fourth is learned from the teacher,
one-fourth the student grasps on his own,
one-fourth from fellow students, and
one-fourth with the passage of time. (or: one-fourth gets "cooked" with time.)