A scientist, an historian or a philosopher does not teach his pupils to be scientists, historians, or philosophers. That is to say, his engagement as a teacher is not merely to educate possible successors to himself—though some of his pupils may turn out to be this. What a university teacher has, and what (because he is not distracted by considerations of immediate usefulness or contemporary appropriateness) he may impart, is familiarity with the modes of thought, the 'languages' which, from one point of view, compose the whole intellectual capital of a civilization. What a university has to offer is not information but practice in thinking; and not practice in thinking in no manner in particular but in specific manners each capable of reaching its own characteristic kind of conclusions. And what undergraduates may get at a university, and nowhere else in such favourable circumstances, is some understanding of what it is to think historically, mathematically, scientifically or philosophically, and some understanding of these not as 'subjects', but as living 'languages' and of those who explore and speak them as being engaged in explanatory enterprises of different sorts.
(Michael Oakeshott, "The Study of 'Politics' in a University: An Essay in Appropriateness," in his Rationalism in Politics and Other Essays, new and expanded ed. [Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1991], 184-218, at 196-7 [essay first published in 1962])
Keith Burgess-Jackson, J.D., Ph.D. 