[peirce-l] Re: Peircean prayer, was: Re: one list archive now working

[Gary Richmond]

Arnold, Thanks for the reference. It reminded me that I wanted to look up exactly where Peirce had made the distinction between 'institutions of learning' and 'institutions for teaching' and found it here.  CP 5.5833. . . . [I]t is necessary to note what is essentially involved in the Will to Learn. The first thing that the Will to Learn supposes is a dissatisfaction with one's present state of opinion. There lies the secret of why it is that our American universities are so miserably insignificant. What have they done for the advance of civilization? What is the great idea or where is [the] single great man who can truly be said to be the product of an American university? The English universities, rotting with sloth as they always have, have nevertheless in the past given birth to Locke and to Newton, and in our time to Cayley, Sylvester, and Clifford. The German universities have been the light of the whole world. The medieval University of Bologna gave Europe its system of law. The University of Paris and that despised scholasticism took Abelard and made him into Descartes. The reason was that they were institutions of learning while ours are institutions for teaching. In order that a man's whole heart may be in teaching he must be thoroughly imbued with the vital importance and absolute truth of what he has to teach; while in order that he may have any measure of success in learning he must be penetrated with a sense of the unsatisfactoriness of his present condition of knowledge. The two attitudes are almost irreconcilable [emphasis added] I assume this is the same passage you had in mind (you wrote "mired in sloth" whereas the above has it as "rotting with sloth" but it seems to refer to the same matter). So this shows Peirce once again to have analyzed an issue which is only now beginning to get adequate attention. As Richard Hake wrote a few days ago: In their [Barr and Tagg (1995)] landmark wake-up call to higher education "From Teaching to Learning: A New Paradigm for Undergraduate Education," they wrote: "A paradigm shift is occurring in American higher education. Under the traditional, dominant 'Instruction Paradigm' colleges are institutions that exist to *provide instruction." Subtly but profoundly, however, a 'Learning Paradigm' is taking hold, whereby colleges are institutions that exist to *produce learning*. This shift is both needed and wanted, and it changes everything." If only the President of Harvard, or the trustees of the Carnegie Foundation, or etc , etc. been able to see the vast potential value of Peirce's research, how much further along semeiotic, etc. might be today. (I'm also reminded that Hake took me to task for copying the material below my signature and am trying to remember to delete earlier copied posts in the interest of not encumbering the Gmane archive.) Gary --- Message from peirce-l forum to subscriber archive@mail-archive.com