It also notes the cruel contradiction that at the very moment a dancer attains some knowledge and overview of the art, the body is already past its prime.
The education there was based on erudition, the eventual goal being that by the age of 18 the students would have learned "to vary one sentence diversely, to make a verse exactly, to endight an epistle eloquently and learnedly, to declaim of a theme simple, and last of all to attain some competent knowledge of the Greek tongue".
(To say that one can attain, by reason, some knowledge of God is not to say that everyone can do this).
The latter are hopeless and are left with no religion, mostly due to their opinions that only the people who attain scientific knowledge have some kind of existence after death.
Attaining some level of knowledge is your responsibility.
But this is not a problem if we also have a culturally developed capacity for autonomous moral reflection and reasoning that allows us to attain moral knowledge despite the presence of some unreliable influences.
You attain to knowledge by argument; You attain a craft or skill by practice; If voluntary poverty's your choice, companionship's the way, not hand or tongue.
The act by which these kids have fulfilled themselves has ended any possibility that we might attain further knowledge of their temperaments or their souls.
And an act of alchemy, too, like mixing an elixir to resurrect a lost loved one or attain prohibited knowledge or ward off harm.
Knowledge of one's sub-personal cognitive biases is, if anything, even harder to attain than knowledge of one's personal epistemic vices.
I developed a strategy of reiteration and cross-reference to help student internalize the material and attain solid knowledge.
