Education Quote by Simon Newcomb

There is a polite little act of rebellion tucked inside Newcomb's Victorian syntax. "What we now call" is a quiet needle: he frames regimented schooling as a historically contingent invention, not a natural law. Then he itemizes the machinery of institutional education - fixed studies, stated hours, constant guidance - until it sounds less like enlightenment than like timekeeping. The punch lands in the understatement, "I could scarcely be said to have enjoyed": not a melodramatic complaint, just the cool suggestion that he escaped something he was never properly subjected to.

The intent is partly autobiographical (Newcomb was largely self-taught in a rural, resource-thin context), but the subtext is broader: real intellectual formation can happen outside credentialed pipelines. Coming from a mathematician and astronomer who rose to the top of 19th-century American science, the line doubles as a credential of a different kind. It implies that his authority isn't the product of compliance; it's the product of curiosity strong enough to survive without scaffolding.

Context matters here because Newcomb lived during the professionalization of knowledge. Science was shifting from gentlemanly pursuit to institutionally managed career, with schools and standardized curricula increasingly serving as gatekeepers. His wording performs a balancing act: he critiques the system without sounding like an anti-education crank. The sentence is built to reassure respectable readers ("school training" as a defined norm) while also flattering the self-directed mind. It's not anti-teacher so much as anti-automation: a defense of learning that isn't scheduled into existence.