At school you are not engaged so much in acquiring knowledge as in making mental efforts under criticism... you go to...school not so much for knowledge as for arts and habits; for the habit of attention, for the art of expression, for the art of assuming at a moment's notice, a new intellectual position, for the art of entering quickly into another person's thoughts, for the habit of submitting to censure and refutation, for the art of indicating assent or dissent in graduated terms, for the habit of regarding minute points of accuracy, for the art of working out what is possible in a given time; for taste, for discrimination, for mental courage and mental soberness.
William Johnson Cory, Headmaster at Eton, 1861
