Lessons from the Past?

Abstract

Today, how can we not speak of the university?... Have I said how one must not speak, today, of the university? Or have I rather spoken as one should not do today, within the University? Only others can answer. Beginning with you. - Jacques Derrida (1983: 3, 20) Let us begin with the first keyword in our title, lesson, whose first English meaning the OED traces to the 1580s: "an occurrence from which something can be learned" (from Middle English, from Old French leçon, from Latin 'lectionem' [nominative 'lectio']), "a reading," a noun of action from the past participle stem of 'legere', "to read." The word's early derivations richly suggest, as does the complex history of English as a discipline, its entanglement in other narratives and other disciplines. Lesson, from the thirteenth-century word for "a reading aloud from the Bible," can also refer to a portion of scripture read in divine service - hence, to religion and English literature, as Alison Wood's essay discusses - and reading aloud (recitation and memorization). This is opposed to the more recent practice of silently reading long, complex texts in the vernacular for the purposes of academic study, which must be, as Catherine Robson's work has brilliantly demonstrated, part of the reframing of the story of education in the second half of the nineteenth and the early decades of the twentieth century.