Study is an end in itself, much of the time. And where we reduce our study in this way to some immediate end, we will lose at a least a portion of the joy and reward of inquiry. But your most glorious moments in the physics laboratory will not be those that fall neatly into line as leading on to your vocation. To the contrary, they will be those moments in which the excitement of learning and discovering brings you a joy that stands alone. In this sense, as in the language of the medievel universities, students and professors here are scholars together, studying together in a joint enterprise, with the professors situated much farther down the road of study and research, but on the same road and with the same purpose and direction.
Great teaching is itself a kind of mystery.
Dostoevsky has Alyosha Karamozov smile skeptically at the bold assertions of a fourteen year old who suddenly realizes, under the influence of just that smile, how much he has to learn. In one of the many beautiful images of teaching that Plato, the student, attached to his memory of Socrates, his teacher, a spark jumps from one soul to another at the moment of learning, igniting the same fire, with the same brightness and warmth in both. Critics, too, have emphasized questions of attitude or motivation. Critics as far back as the Greeks have attacked the bad attitudes of students, seen as idlers and dilettantes, carousing and cutting classes, more interested in romance than study. Aristophanes went after Socrates and the other teachers of his period as distractedly and absurdly intellectual and occasionally corrupt.