Students are here not for service or for culture, but for the selfish end of preparing for salary to come. Constantly I hear them asking, 'If I change over to your course, what kind of a job will it help me to get when I graduate?' Students are weighing every subject they take on the scales of jobs to come.

You become what you study.

"I once read that people who study others are wise but those who study themselves are enlightened".

This irritated or puzzled such students of literature and their professors as were accustomed to ‘serious’ courses replete with ‘trends ’ and ‘schools ’ and ‘myths ’ and ‘symbols ’ and ‘social comment ’ and something unspeakably spooky called ‘climate of thought.’ Actually these ‘serious’ courses were quite easy ones with the students required to know not the books but about the books.

I do not think it is wise to force them to study one thing or another, although persuading them to do so would not be harmful; and when there is no need to study pane lucrando,1 if the student is so fortunate that heaven has endowed him with parents who can spare him that, it would be my opinion that they should allow him to pursue the area of knowledge to which they can see he is inclined; although poetry is less useful than pleasurable, it is not one of those that dishonors the one who knows it.

On recent and contemporary literature [students'] need is least and our help least. They ought to understand it better than we, and if they do not then there is something radically wrong either with them or with the literature. But I need not labour the point. There is an intrinsic absurdity in making current literature a subject of academic study, and the student who wants a tutor's assistance in reading the works of his own contemporaries might as well ask for a nurse's assistance in blowing his own nose.

Studying what is specific to one culture is often the first step toward understanding many cultures. And that, finally, is the best reason, I think, for studying literature altogether.

Studying others gives us knowledge, but studying yourself ultimately leads to an incredible amount of freedom.

Be a student, not a follower

People who devote their lives to studying something often come to believe that the object of their fascination is the key to understanding everything.

The aim of a student’s life should be to overcome any illusions or prejudices he may have and to give up mean habits. He should, and it is his duty to, propagate education among his illiterate brothers and to consider the propagation of education as part of his own education. He ought to acquire knowledge for the sake of knowledge and he should not be unaware of the needs of life.

A principal aim of education is to give students a taste for literature, for the books of life and power, and to accomplish this, it is necessary that their minds be held aloof from the babblement and discussions of the hour, that they may accustom themselves to take interest in the words and deeds of the greatest men, and so make themselves able and worthy to shape a larger and nobler future; but if their hours of leisure are spent over journals and reviews, they will, in later years, become the helpless victims of the newspaper habit.

No one can become really educated without having pursued some study in which he took no interest—for it is a part of education to interest ourselves in subjects for which we have no aptitude.

In every area of your life, you need to study; there is no end to education. You don’t just go into movies just because you have the talent alone but you know, education is not limited to the four walls of the university. When you observe people, you can even give yourself personal training.