"Diligent as one must be in learning, one must be as diligent in forgetting; otherwise the process is one of pedantry, not culture"
About this Quote
Nock’s barb lands on a fault line that still runs through educated life: the difference between accumulating knowledge and becoming the kind of person knowledge is supposed to shape. “Diligent in learning” flatters the modern virtue of optimization - courses, credentials, productivity. Then he twists the blade: you must be equally diligent in forgetting. Not ignorance, but pruning. Forgetting here means shedding the dead weight of trivia, borrowed opinions, and fashionable certainties that clog judgment. Culture, in Nock’s sense, isn’t a hard drive; it’s a metabolism.
The intent is quietly elitist and aggressively anti-credential. Nock disliked mass schooling’s tendency to produce compliant experts and anxious status-seekers. In that context, “pedantry” names a particular disease: the person who can cite, catalog, and correct, yet can’t synthesize, choose, or live with proportion. Pedantry hoards; culture selects. One performs knowledge; the other digests it until it becomes taste, discrimination, a moral and aesthetic orientation.
The subtext is also a warning about the ego. Learning can be a respectable way to avoid thinking: if you keep adding facts, you never have to risk an interpretation. Forgetting is the courage to let go of what once made you feel secure - the memorized argument, the canonical name-drop, the identity of “the well-read one.” Nock isn’t arguing against scholarship; he’s arguing that without deliberate subtraction, scholarship turns into a nervous tic. Culture is what remains when you stop proving you’ve been taught.
The intent is quietly elitist and aggressively anti-credential. Nock disliked mass schooling’s tendency to produce compliant experts and anxious status-seekers. In that context, “pedantry” names a particular disease: the person who can cite, catalog, and correct, yet can’t synthesize, choose, or live with proportion. Pedantry hoards; culture selects. One performs knowledge; the other digests it until it becomes taste, discrimination, a moral and aesthetic orientation.
The subtext is also a warning about the ego. Learning can be a respectable way to avoid thinking: if you keep adding facts, you never have to risk an interpretation. Forgetting is the courage to let go of what once made you feel secure - the memorized argument, the canonical name-drop, the identity of “the well-read one.” Nock isn’t arguing against scholarship; he’s arguing that without deliberate subtraction, scholarship turns into a nervous tic. Culture is what remains when you stop proving you’ve been taught.
Quote Details
| Topic | Learning |
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