Education Quote by Clifton Fadiman

A lot of memoir is retroactive glow; Fadiman aims for something sharper: the discipline of not pretending. The first clause swats away the vanity of credential as knowledge. “Not of course an educated man” is wryly self-deprecating, but it’s also a quiet indictment of how often schooling confuses completion with cultivation. He’s telling you he finished the track without mistaking the track for the journey.

The pivot is the real payload: “but I knew how to try to become one.” Education, in Fadiman’s telling, isn’t a status you receive; it’s a practice you learn to perform. The key word is “try,” which lowers the temperature of genius myths. It privileges method over brilliance: curiosity that can survive boredom, reading that isn’t just consumption, the willingness to revise your own tastes and assumptions. That’s the subtext: the educated person is not the one who has facts, but the one who has trained the muscles that keep seeking them.

Context matters. Fadiman came of age in an era that still treated “self-education” as a democratic ladder and a cultural aspiration, not a quaint hobby. His career as an editor and public intellectual depended on translating “high culture” without bowing to it. The line functions like a blueprint for that role: respect learning, distrust pretension, keep the door open. It’s an argument for education as an ethic, not a trophy.