“The quality of your intellectual formation has nothing to do with what you can get in academia, in universities. Nothing. There you have only professional exchange.
The personal circle of intellectuals who are friends, who know each other, and thus are able to exchange experience in depth, this is the real locus of learning. It’s not schools or universities.
When I taught in Rio de Janeiro, we created a series with interviews with Brazilian intellectuals who had appeared in the 30s – the 30s and the 40s were the most brilliant for Brazilian culture. The question was: “where did you learn?” And every single one of them answered: “in personal meetings”. It was never in the university, even for those who had studied abroad in the best universities. Even for them, it was not in the universities that they learned.
This means that it is the meeting of intelligent people that is the basic circumstance to develop intelligence. Later, investigating history, I saw that it was precisely the case, for example, among the Scholastics; it was what had happened in Austria in the beginning of the 20th century, what had happened in the age of German romanticism. In several periods where there had been an extraordinary flourishing of intelligence, it was within groups of people who knew each other and who, sometimes were even more than friends, they were even relatives, since one would marry the other’s sister or something like that.”
Olavo de Carvalho 