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Scholarship Scholar

1911 Encyclopedia Britannica

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The term "scholar," primarily meaning a "learner," is secondarily applied to one who has thoroughly learnt all that "the school" can teach him, one who by early training and constant self-culture has attained a certain maturity in precise and accurate knowledge. Hence the term "scholarship" in the sense of the knowledge or method of a scholar. Similarly "classical scholarship" may be defined as the sum of the mental attainments of a classical scholar. Scholarship is sometimes identified with classical learning or erudition; it is more often contrasted with it. The contrast is thus drawn by Donaldson in his Classical Scholarship and Classical Learning (1856), and by Mark Pattison, in his Essay on Oxford Studies (1855). "I maintain," says Donaldson, "that not all learned men are accomplished scholars, though any accomplished scholar may, if he chooses to devote the time to the necessary studies, become a learned man" (p. 149). "It is not a knowledge," writes Mark Pattison, "but a discipline, that is required; not science, but the scientific habit; not erudition, but scholarship" ( Essays, i. 425).

The expression "a scholarship" is also used in England for a money payment made by a school, college or university, as a prize (either for one year or a series of years) to the successful competitors at an examination at which one or more such scholarships are to be awarded; and the successful candidate is called a "scholar," as the holder of a "scholarship." In this sense the word is almost synonymous with "an exhibition," but the latter is usually considered inferior in merit and dignity, if not in amount.

On the general history of classical scholarship, see

CLASSICS: Greek and Latin.