This study analyzes the term student ownership of learning, aiming for fruitful application beyond the perpetuating of slogans. The analysis identifies four specific misuses of ownership resulting from the sloganeering of this term: a lack of definition, unconscious shifts among meanings, inconsistent specification of causal relationships, and the uncritical grouping of undefined slogans. Then it distinguishes among three meanings of ownership as it is used in the education literature: ownership as right and responsibility, ownership as buy-in, and ownership as identifying with. Student ownership of learning is then discussed as an attitudinal reorientation towards a personal learning quest, which emerges after some catalyzing experience, or in the awakening of a personal calling. It is distinguished from the love of learning and from the other educational uses of ownership and, lastly, considered as a defined standard of success for schools.