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Excerpt
An independent scholar is an oxymoron. A scholar is part of an ongoing community, requiring by definition (from Latin schola, school) preceptors (living or dead). Those who work alone do so within the invisible academy of predecessors and of colleagues' writings and products.
An individual may generate ideas in isolation, never communicating them to others, but scholarship lives in community. Young scholars make a commitment in order to be accepted into a scholarly community— they will study diligently, work to contribute new knowledge, and possibly eventually teach. Early scholarly consortia were tiny—several students taught by one teacher, for example. Later they became literally communities, with students working on daily chores as well as their studies, but this arrangement soon settled into the more familiar pattern of a group of faculty members pursuing their own studies while teaching a body of specialized knowledge to students. “Schools of thought” was meant literally, because schools (universities) were organized around philosophies or approaches to knowledge. Now “schools of thought” is a metaphor, referring to groups of like-minded scholars, such as Freudians or postmodernists.
Scholars are known as much for their controversies as for their learning. Discussion and disputation are the lifeblood of thinking and learning but also are the precursors to division—often healthily as when new bodies of knowledge create burgeoning new specialties, and sometimes acrimoniously with charges of intellectual heresy and even of deceit.
Nonetheless, behind differences in scholarly communities' styles of organization or communication lies the common pursuit of knowledge. Scholars discover previously unknown information, create new knowledge through synthesis, integrate new knowledge into existing frameworks, design ways to apply new knowledge, and teach current knowledge using the best methods established by scholarship.
Medical educators trying to define—or to quantify— “true” scholarly work may feel that the objective they are trying to reach is as evanescent as the ship in the Turner painting.
