Word: pedantic
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...problems. In consequence, we apply it to matters that can never be reduced to formulas and cold logic. Human life is only partially rational. And by considering it wholly so, much of our education has become so much fact and circumstances dumped out of the dusty confines of some pedant's notebook and abandoned by him like so many blasted stumps on a sand-dune, completely severed from life and all things living. We are just awakening to the fact that by neglecting the imaginative and spiritual side of life, much of our education has reached an advanced stage...
True scholarship is as easily distinguished from pedantry as day from night, once the true scholar is recognized. But the student who is not already a scholar cannot be blamed for confounding the two, especially since they have a specious resemblance. When a professor who is also a pedant poses as a scholar, such a student, if he is human, may be pardoned for saying: "If that be scholarship, I'll none...
...second place, what a student sees of scholarship in some of those who claim to represent its glories is more likely to repel than attract him. The grind sitting at his elbow and the pedant standing on the lecture platform are poor ambassadors to the student from that wondrous Republic of Intellect whose advantages are so often talked about, but so rarely demonstrated. The normal student wants to become a well-rounded man. In the grind he sees an impotent and grotesque shadow of a man, and in the pedant, the father of the grind...
...Both pedant and scholar deal with the same materials. Their difference is in their methods. Both may be thought of as playing a game, with bones as counters. The pedant shuffles the bones about in the dust, toys with them, scrutinizes them under a high powered microscope, classifies them, and then leaves them--dry bones. The scholar goes through the same procedure, but before he quits the game, he breathes into his bones the breath of life, and from the dust of ages emerges a living idea. The scholar has connected them with life, and that vital connection marks...
...turns him hence a pedant or a fool...