If I think of my own education as chiefly a literary one, it is not in the conventional sense that a literary education might have been construed a century or so ago. The beneficiary of such an education at that time would have been expected to know thoroughly the literary history of his own and at least another nation; he would be in possession of two or three if not all the Romance languages and the two main ancient ones; he would have a mastery of the rules if not the practice of prosody, and carry in his head yards and yards of poetry and long tracts of Shakespeare.
My own literary education bears no resemblance to this. Describing it quickly, I should call it slapdash, wildly uneven, and chiefly autodidactical. But, then, apart from those people trained as professional scholars or scientists, we are all finally autodidacts, making our way on our own as best we can, with our real teachers being the books we happen to read. Because of this, the best that any university can do is point its students in the right direction: let them know what the intellectual possibilities are and give them a taste of the best that has been thought and written in the past. In this regard, the University of Chicago of my student days may be said to have done its job.
(Joseph Epstein, "A Literary Education," The New Criterion 26 [June 2008]: 10-6, at 13)
Note from KBJ: Here is the Wikipedia entry on autodidacticism.
