"Concerning culture as a process, one would say that it means learning a great many things and then forgetting them; and the forgetting is as necessary as the learning"
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Culture is not a cabinet of curiosities filled with facts; it is a way the mind and character are shaped by contact with many things until they become habits of perception. One studies languages, histories, sciences, arts, manners, arguments, and methods, then allows most of the particulars to fade. What remains is the distilled pattern: standards of taste, a sense of proportion, the cadence of good prose, the habit of skepticism, the feel for evidence, the intuition of when a claim is weak and when it is strong. Forgetting is not failure but the sign that the learning has sunk beneath the surface and turned into reflex.
Albert J. Nock, an early twentieth-century essayist and critic of utilitarian schooling, insisted that liberal learning was formative rather than accumulative. He distrusted the notion that culture is a pile of information or credentials. Training that clings to facts breeds pedantry; cultivation allows facts to compost into judgment. One may forget the dates of dynasties but retain a grasp of how power migrates; forget the rules of counterpoint yet hear when a phrase resolves with rightness; forget a logical formula while thinking with logical care. The mind prunes, as living systems do, so that what is vital can move quickly and freely.
Calling culture a process sets it against the anxiety of permanence. The world changes; details become obsolete; only the habits of attention, sympathy, and discrimination travel well. By learning widely and then forgetting, a person becomes both lighter and stronger, freed from hoarding and skilled in use. The end is not encyclopedic recall but an inner climate where new experience finds a place, where taste and judgment operate without fuss, where one can respond aptly without consulting a manual. Culture, seen this way, is not what you carry but what you become.
Albert J. Nock, an early twentieth-century essayist and critic of utilitarian schooling, insisted that liberal learning was formative rather than accumulative. He distrusted the notion that culture is a pile of information or credentials. Training that clings to facts breeds pedantry; cultivation allows facts to compost into judgment. One may forget the dates of dynasties but retain a grasp of how power migrates; forget the rules of counterpoint yet hear when a phrase resolves with rightness; forget a logical formula while thinking with logical care. The mind prunes, as living systems do, so that what is vital can move quickly and freely.
Calling culture a process sets it against the anxiety of permanence. The world changes; details become obsolete; only the habits of attention, sympathy, and discrimination travel well. By learning widely and then forgetting, a person becomes both lighter and stronger, freed from hoarding and skilled in use. The end is not encyclopedic recall but an inner climate where new experience finds a place, where taste and judgment operate without fuss, where one can respond aptly without consulting a manual. Culture, seen this way, is not what you carry but what you become.
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| Topic | Learning |
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