James V. Schall’s Another Sort of Learning, first published in 1988, addresses students who suspect that something important may be missing from formal education even when they are succeeding academically. Schall does not reject universities, teachers, grades, or professional training. His concern is that education can become too narrowly organized around credentials, employment, technique, or ideological conformity and fail to cultivate judgment about truth, goodness, and the purposes knowledge should serve. Writing from a Jesuit and classical philosophical perspective, he argues that intellectual freedom depends on disciplined reading, serious teachers, personal responsibility, and the willingness to pursue questions beyond the official curriculum. “Another sort of learning” is therefore not anti-school. It is a form of lifelong inquiry that prevents institutional education from becoming the final boundary of the mind and asks students to take responsibility for what they continue to learn after assignments, grades, and formal requirements end (Schall, 1988).
Why Formal Education Can Feel Incomplete
Students can complete courses, earn high grades, and still remain uncertain about how their subjects connect or why they matter. A curriculum necessarily divides knowledge into departments and courses, but important human questions rarely remain inside those boundaries. Questions about justice, death, technology, beauty, religion, political authority, love, or the meaning of work may involve philosophy, history, literature, science, and theology at the same time. Schall writes for the student who notices this fragmentation and wants to continue learning beyond assigned tasks. His criticism is also directed at the idea that useful knowledge is only knowledge with immediate economic application. Professional competence matters, but a person can be technically capable and still lack judgment about what is worth doing. A doctor, engineer, lawyer, teacher, or manager needs more than specialized skill because professional decisions affect human beings and institutions. Liberal learning supplies resources for asking whether a goal is just, whether a claim is true, and whether efficiency serves a worthwhile end.
Schall sometimes writes sharply about universities that exclude questions concerning truth, God, morality, or human nature before inquiry begins, yet his argument should not be generalized into the claim that universities are inherently corrupt or intellectually closed. Institutions provide libraries, laboratories, expertise, professional training, and communities of argument that independent learners may struggle to obtain alone. His stronger point is that no institution can complete a person’s education on the student’s behalf. A university may introduce important texts, methods, and questions, but the student must still decide whether to read beyond the syllabus, revisit assumptions, and pursue intellectual interests that do not produce an immediate credential. Formal education can therefore be necessary without being sufficient. The incompleteness Schall describes is not simply a defect in institutions; it is a reminder that serious learning ultimately depends on habits the learner must continue to practice independently.
Truth, Teaching, and Intellectual Freedom
Schall’s account of education depends on the belief that truth is possible. He rejects the idea that every claim is only an expression of power, culture, or personal preference. The classical understanding of truth as saying of what is that it is, and of what is not that it is not, is associated with Aristotle, and it implies that sincerity, popularity, or authority do not make a statement true. A judgment must answer to reality. This commitment does not require naïve certainty because human beings make mistakes, evidence can be incomplete, and interpretation can change. Intellectual humility means remaining open to correction while still believing that better and worse judgments are possible. If all truth claims were dismissed in advance, reading and argument would lose much of their purpose because no conclusion could be more accurate than another. Schall therefore treats the possibility of truth as the condition that gives teaching, reading, and disagreement their seriousness (Aristotle).
Teaching follows from this understanding. A teacher begins where the learner currently stands but should not leave the learner there. Good teaching respects existing knowledge while introducing distinctions, evidence, texts, and questions that allow students to see more clearly. The teacher’s authority should not replace reasoning; its purpose is to help students become increasingly capable of judgment without depending permanently on the teacher. This also explains Schall’s suspicion of intellectual performance for its own sake. A student may speak confidently in public, win debates, or produce fashionable opinions without understanding a subject deeply. Thought sometimes requires silence, rereading, uncertainty, and the willingness to revise a position. Public discussion becomes educational when it grows from disciplined preparation rather than from the desire to appear clever or socially aligned with a particular group.
Reading, Rereading, and the Personal Library
Reading is central to Schall’s idea of independent learning because books allow students to encounter minds beyond their immediate institution, generation, and social environment. Assigned reading can begin that process, but the most important intellectual question in a person’s life may never appear on a syllabus. A durable reading life allows education to continue after a course ends and after formal schooling is complete. Rereading is especially important because the reader changes. A book encountered at eighteen may reveal something different at thirty or sixty because experience alters attention and makes previously minor passages newly significant. Rereading therefore tests both the text and the reader. It can reveal that an early interpretation was shallow, expose questions missed the first time, and show how knowledge accumulates gradually. Schall’s approach treats reading not as information consumption but as sustained intellectual companionship with arguments and authors that remain worth returning to.
The personal library represents this continuity. Schall does not require an enormous collection or treat ownership itself as a sign of education. The value of a library lies in maintaining access to books that deserve repeated consultation. Ownership can support annotation and comparison, but public libraries and digital collections can serve similar purposes when cost or space is limited. The deeper principle is intentional selection. A personal library preserves works because they remain important, whereas an algorithmic feed tends to privilege what is new, popular, emotionally engaging, or immediately relevant. This idea should not become an excuse for a narrow canon. A serious library can include classical works while also including women, minority traditions, critics of inherited institutions, contemporary science, and voices shaped by different cultures. Intellectual freedom requires both continuity and expansion rather than a collection designed only to confirm one worldview (Schall, 2014).
Self-Discipline, Attention, Grades, and Lectures
Schall treats self-discipline as a foundation of learning because difficult thought requires control of attention, time, and appetite. A student who intends to read but responds to every interruption may remain surrounded by information without understanding much of it. This point has become even more relevant in a media environment built around continuous notification, short-form content, and rapid emotional response. Digital technology provides extraordinary access to information, but access does not guarantee attention. The challenge is not to reject technology but to use it deliberately rather than allowing platforms to determine the rhythm of thought. Schall connects discipline with freedom because immediate desire is not always a reliable guide to what a person ultimately values. Choosing to study, practice, reflect, or delay distraction may feel restrictive in the moment, but it expands capability over time. The disciplined person becomes able to do what an undisciplined person may sincerely wish to do but cannot sustain.
Grades and lectures fit into the same argument. Formal assessment has legitimate purposes because teachers need to evaluate work, provide feedback, and certify competence, but problems arise when the grade replaces the subject. A student who asks only what will appear on the test may optimize short-term performance while losing curiosity. Schall’s idea of “personal grading” asks whether study changed understanding, exposed error, or created a question worth pursuing after the course ended. Lectures can similarly be valuable when they present a coherent argument, clarify a difficult text, or reveal relationships students would not discover immediately on their own, but they become passive when learners merely copy information. A strong lecture is more like a map than a complete journey. It directs attention toward problems and sources that students must continue exploring independently through reading, reflection, and discussion.
Faith, Reason, Moral Judgment, and the Role of Teachers
Schall’s Catholic intellectual background shapes his insistence that faith and reason should not be treated as natural enemies. Reason investigates reality through evidence and argument, while revelation concerns claims that cannot simply be derived from ordinary inquiry. His position is that truth cannot ultimately contradict truth, although human interpretations of both reason and revelation can be mistaken. This approach challenges two forms of reduction: anti-intellectual religion can treat questioning as disloyal, while a narrowly secular model can exclude religious questions as irrational before examining them. A serious university should distinguish philosophical argument, historical evidence, theological reasoning, and personal testimony while allowing each to be examined appropriately. The purpose is not to make every student religious but to avoid defining legitimate inquiry too narrowly and to preserve the possibility that questions about transcendence belong within intellectual life.
Moral judgment matters for the same reason. Education should not merely produce clever people capable of achieving any objective efficiently. Knowledge increases power, and power without moral evaluation can increase harm. Questions about right and wrong therefore belong beside questions about what is technically possible. Teachers help cultivate that judgment, but Schall also understands teaching as reciprocal. Students can alter teachers through unexpected questions, misunderstandings, and perspectives, and explaining a familiar subject may expose gaps that private study did not reveal. Gratitude for teachers does not require treating them as infallible. The best teacher reduces dependency by helping students become capable of reading, comparison, and judgment themselves. Intellectual authority succeeds when it produces greater independence rather than permanent submission.
Conclusion
Another Sort of Learning challenges students to take responsibility for an education that formal institutions can begin but cannot finish. Schall connects truth, teaching, reading, self-discipline, personal libraries, lectures, grades, faith, and moral judgment through one central concern: whether learning leads toward greater contact with reality and wiser action or only toward credentials and social conformity. His argument is strongest when it encourages intellectual independence rather than institutional rejection. Universities provide valuable resources, professional training is necessary, and classical traditions should be read alongside a diverse range of voices. Yet the learner still has to cultivate attention, return to difficult books, examine inherited beliefs, and continue studying when no assignment requires it. Education becomes fuller when knowledge is not merely possessed but ordered toward truth, judgment, and a life capable of asking what is worth knowing and doing.
References
Aristotle. Metaphysics. In J. Barnes (Ed.), The Complete Works of Aristotle. Princeton University Press, 1984.
Pieper, Josef. Leisure: The Basis of Culture. Pantheon, 1952.
Schall, James V. Another Sort of Learning. Ignatius Press, 1988.
Schall, James V. The Classical Moment: Selected Essays on Knowledge and Its Pleasures. St. Augustine’s Press, 2014.
Weil, Simone. “Reflections on the Right Use of School Studies with a View to the Love of God.” In Waiting for God. Harper Perennial.
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