Milliner on friendship and education.

Public Discourse has a new essay by Matthew Milliner, one section of which I'd like to endorse:

Christopher Olaf Blum’s essay “Newman’s Collegiate Ideal” explains that Newman’s focus on friendship enabled the university to be “not a chance collection of individuals building their careers, but a kind of fellowship, even a friendship, whose characteristic activity was to ‘rejoice in the truth’ (gaudium de veritate).” Common meals were the soil where acquaintanceship grew into friendship, which Aristotle understood to be among the highest of life’s rewards. Genuine learning without the “pure and clear atmosphere of thought” fostered by true friendship was difficult to achieve. Like Origen, Newman understood that “personal influence… was the means of propagating the truth.”

In an age of unmanageable class sizes and overworked (and out of work) professors, advocating such an intimate scale of virtue-based learning may seem naive. Yet such ideals are probably closer to most of our own learning histories than we might think. If a given class distilled more than mere information, but instead shaped our lives and futures, some kind of friendship probably played a role. Wherever our own education occurred, or is occurring, transformative learning continues to happen as it always has—through communities of friendships upheld by some measure of mutual virtue.

The best thing that ever happened to me, intellectually, was that my friends and I had to take the same classes and read the same books. Our discussions gave me a stake in my coursework, which touched off a cycle. Imagining higher education based on a principle of friendship — why, one might think that the striving for wisdom is the second paradise of world.