scholastic
/skəˈlastɪk
/adjective
1Of or concerning schools and education: scholastic achievement...
- It is also a little reassuring that scholastic achievement across the range of abilities is so welcomed and valued in the public reaction to the results round.
- He didn't have the scholastic achievement I did.
- The first issue may include measures of scholastic achievement, aptitude tests, and selection interviews.
Synonyms
academic, educational, school, scholarly
1.1US Relating to secondary schools: scholastic sports events...
- The aim is to promote their dominance in such areas as football, recruiting and scholastic sports along with its in-depth coverage.
- As of mid-December 2003, there were scholastic chess events scheduled in Seattle, for February 2004, that were already fully booked and closed to new registrants.
- This is the only book that I'm aware of that directly addresses the needs and concerns of the most important participants in scholastic tournaments: the players and their parents.
2Relating to medieval scholasticism.Idioms of feudal law also applied to royal jurisdiction and government, which is why St Thomas Aquinas, the leading scholastic thinker of the High Middle Ages, debated the powers of monarchy in this vein....
- Renaissance humanism gradually replaced the medieval scholastic tradition from which it emerged.
- Hobbes's contempt for scholastic philosophy is boundless.
2.1Typical of scholasticism in being pedantic or overly subtle: to distinguish between them is little more than a scholastic exercise
Synonyms
scholarly, learned, academic, erudite, donnish;
pedantic, over-subtle, overprecise, hair-splitting, precisionist
informal nitpicking
archaic overnice
noun
1 Philosophy & Theology, historical An adherent of scholasticism; a schoolman.Of the medieval scholastics, Aquinas was less interested in who ruled than in the uses to which the ruling interest was put....
- Thus we can see at this point a fundamental ‘vacuity’ in the attempt by Aquinas and other scholastics to harness ‘Plato and Aristotle’ for the purposes of Trinitarian doctrine.
- These and later theologians would also have introduced him to the ideas of the Christian scholastics.
2(In the Roman Catholic Church) a member of a religious order, especially the Society of Jesus, who is between the novitiate and the priesthood.There are 203 Jesuits, including priests, brothers and scholastics, in Ireland.
Derivatives
scholastically
[sentence adverb]: I don’t think the school was anything very much scholastically...
- They are not people who are not intellectually nor scholastically deficient.
- Children are certainly tempted to watch television instead of mastering reading, and those who succumb will be permanently impaired scholastically.
- But such minor quibbles aside, the book is rich, scholastically challenging, and another milestone in the journey towards clarity in our understanding of the sense-making processes and products of ourselves and others.
Origin
Late 16th century (in sense 2 of the adjective): via Latin from Greek skholastikos 'studious', from skholazein 'be at leisure to study', from skholē (see school1).