Education, and particularly higher education, represents a danger for any established authority, and particularly so when it gives its pupils access to a long and distinguished intellectual tradition. The pupils of Plato are rarely conventional good citizens. And those who have learnt from Aristotle to analyse and to compare, tend to do so just when those in power least want them to.
"A peculiar anthologic maze, an amusing literary chaos, a farrago of quotations, a mere olla podrida of quaintness, a pot pourri of pleasant delites, a florilegium of elegant extracts, a tangled fardel of old-world flowers of thought, a faggot of odd fancies, quips, facetiae, loosely tied" (Holbrook Jackson, Anatomy of Bibliomania) by a "laudator temporis acti," a "praiser of time past" (Horace, Ars Poetica 173).
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Saturday, August 26, 2017
A Danger
Robert Browning (1914-1997), "Enlightenment and Repression in Byzantium in the Eleventh and Twelfth Centuries," Past & Present 69 (November, 1975) 3-23 (at 3):