Aging & Wisdom Quote by Samuel Butler

Butler’s jab lands because it twists the most respectable word in the Victorian toolkit - “educating” - into an alibi for intellectual failure. Oxford and Cambridge pride themselves on forming “young men,” a phrase that signals class reproduction as much as learning. Butler’s line pretends to praise the dons’ diligence, then flips it: they are so consumed by the machinery of education that they have no time left for teaching. The irony isn’t just that education can be empty; it’s that the institution can become a full-time performance of seriousness, a bureaucracy of cultivation, while actual instruction - the risky business of changing minds - gets crowded out.

The subtext is a critique of credentialing before “credentialism” had a name. Dons are “busy” because their labor is devoted to rituals: examinations, moral supervision, the maintenance of standards, the preservation of a certain type of gentleman. That work produces compliant graduates and stable hierarchies, not necessarily knowledge. Teaching, in Butler’s framing, would mean something more personal and disruptive: attention, curiosity, argument, the willingness to let a student outgrow the system that trained him.

Context matters: Butler wrote in an era when British universities were only slowly modernizing, still dominated by classics, theology, and social gatekeeping. His wit is modern because it exposes a timeless institutional trick: redefine the mission so thoroughly that success can be measured without anyone learning very much.