Knowledge is Not Owned

James V. Schall, "Knowledge is not Owned" in Docilitas: On Teaching and Being Taught. South Bend, Indiana: ST. Augustine's Press, 2016.

I am giving my third read-through of Fr. Schall's book, Docilitas: On Teaching and Being Taught. Schall is one of my favorite authors. Last week I was reading Horace's The Art of Poetry last week. It is an essay on how to write poetry. Horace was a Roman poet who lived before Christ. In this work, he states that an author should both delight and teach. This has been my experience in reading Schall is that I am both delighted and taught.

Schall wrote an essay that I have read many times. The essay is "What a Student Owes His Teacher." This is a surprising thought to students that they owe anything to their teacher. Schall states that the student owes the teacher the "willingness to do the sometimes hard work of learning." This idea might seem strange to many people since many people think students must be entertained. It is also a shock that to learn the important things requires hard work. A significant point that Schall makes is that this is one thing the teacher cannot give the student. The student must be willing to make the effort to learn. The primary agent is learning is the student, not the teacher. The teacher serves more like a guide. Learning is not something you can pour into the top of the student's head. To learn anything, the student's intelligence must be engaged. This willingness to learn is what Schalls calls docilitas.

Schall, in speaking about the desire to learn, asserts: "As a course progresses through a semester or a year, this willingness to be taught should rouse in the student something more. He should find in his soul a conscious desire to learn, a fascination with the whole enterprise, a sense that something exists out there that he wants to know" (3). This makes me think that the most important thing that we receive from education is the feeling of the incompleteness of our education and the desire to keep on learning. I started college over thirty years ago and my desire for learning has not left me. In reality, it makes me realize all that I do not know. Even a whole lifetime is not enough time to know all that we need to know. Schall asserts, "At the end of a course, a student ought to walk away satisfied that he learned something. But he is still fully aware that much is still there to know, deeper, more profoundly" (3). This reminds me of Plato's allegory of the cave which is an allegory of learning. We must rise from things that exist to the truth of things. We must contemplate the great ideas of beauty, truth, goodness, virtue, happiness, and other great ideas. This task cannot be accomplished in our schooling; it can only begin there.

Another truth is that learning facts are not the most important thing. Do not get me wrong; facts are important. However, we will forget more than we remember. The important thing is to have the desire to learn and keep on learning. We might even say that the student needs a passion for learning. Schall also says that the student "should experience a genuine pleasure" in learning. Schall adds, "this excitement and delight are not things that a teacher can give to a student" (3). A teacher can model this eagerness for learning. In addition, the teacher can introduce the student to the world of learning. The student, however, must have this desire for learning within themselves. They need to pursue the truth with a passion. Plato even said that the student needs an eros for wisdom. Schall is a good guide for the student with an eagerness to learn.