Re: Non vitae sed scholae discimus

On Sunday, September 19, 2004, at 02:27 , Andreas Johansson wrote:

> Quoting Ray Brown <ray.brown@...>:
>
>> If he actually meant it the other way round, then it is very bad. "non
>> uitae sed scholae discimus" *cannot* mean 'we learn  not for school but
>> for life' and Seneca would certainly have known that! If in fact he meant
>> the other way round, then he has been extremely careless.
>
> I think Mach meant that Seneca's noting that we, in reality, learn for
> school
> rather than life was meant to imply that, ideally, it should be the other
> way
> around.
Right - I understand that.

[snip]
>> Does any know the context in which the sentence occurs?
>
> I'm given to understand it occurs as criticism of the paedagogical
> practices of
> the Roman schools of his day. Jansson's discussion, in any case,
> presupposes
> that _schola_ means "school" here, and, being a former professor of Latin*
> , he
> should know.
Right - that's precisely why I asked about the context. Quoting single
sentences out of context can be misleading, as indeed this quote shows.

So he really did intend to say, as the Latin itself says: "We learn for
school but not for life". But he was stating it as a _criticism_ of
contemporary educational practices.

The sad thing is that two millennia later, education systems still
encourage pupils/students to learn for school and not for life.

Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose.
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On Sunday, September 19, 2004, at 05:27 , Philippe Caquant wrote:

> From several sources I found on the Web and others,
> Seneca was in fact criticizing a school system whose
> aim was the school itself, instead of life.
Yes - precisely what Andreas has said also. This makes perfect sense.

> He
> actually ascertained a fact rather than he defined
> what should be. Therefore it is not false to quote the
> reverse sentence: Non scholae sed vitae discimus,
> insofar we have in mind what should be, and not what
> exists.
Except that in English 'quote' means repeating the verba_ipsissima (or a
faithful translation of the actual words) not repeating what we may image
the person to be thinking. We may state the latter, but it is not a quote.

We may quote the words "non scholae sed vitae discimus" if we want, but
either give the source as anonymous (we don't know who coined this version)
  or as 'based on Seneca'. But it is false to quote them as Seneca's words.

Indeed, now that I know the context, Seneca's words have far more meaning
for me than the bland and platitudinous "non scholae sed vitae discimus".

> Interesting that, when reading the original sentence,
> nearly everybody thinks immediately that there must be
> a mistake somewhere.
Only if meeting it out of context!

> Probably culture conditioning. We
> understand "discimus" has "we have to learn, we must
> learn, we should learn". But "discimus" means nothing
> of the sort. It just means "we learn".
Eh?? Sorry - we? Who are 'we'? Is this yet another generalization?

There is _nothing_ in my culture condition (Britain of the WWII and
post-WWII) that leads me to understand 'discimus' as meaning anything else
than:
either: "we learn" [habitual]
or: "we are learning" [progressive]

But then in those far off days we were taught to be _accurate_ - a quaint,
  old-fashioned idea, maybe. But that's why I say inaccurate quotes are
false and why I know the difference between 'discimus' and 'nobis
discendum est'.

Ray
===============================================
http://home.freeuk.com/ray.brown
ray.brown@freeuk.com
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"They are evidently confusing science with technology."
UMBERTO ECO				September, 2004

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