Education Quote by Albert J. Nock

Nock is skewering a particularly durable modern superstition: that the mind is a warehouse and intelligence is measured by inventory. The line turns on a small, lethal distinction between “useful knowledge” and “knowledge…worth learning.” By separating the worth of learning from the duty of remembering, he punctures the pedant’s main status symbol: recall as moral virtue. Pedantry, in his telling, isn’t just annoying; it’s an error in epistemology that hardens into a social performance.

The intent is corrective, but the subtext is openly anti-credential. Nock came of age in a culture increasingly dominated by institutions that reward the examinable: schools, bureaucracies, newspapers, professional associations. In that ecosystem, memory becomes a currency. If you can reproduce the fact on demand, you can claim authority; if you can’t, you’re cast as unserious. Nock reads this as a category mistake that lets trivia masquerade as wisdom and turns learning into hoarding.

What makes the sentence work is its calm, almost administrative phrasing, which disguises a sharp insult. “Common error” sounds gentle, but it implicates an entire public: the anxious strivers and the gatekeepers who profit from their anxiety. He’s also defending a richer idea of learning: some knowledge is valuable precisely because it changes perception, trains judgment, or expands taste, not because it can be retrieved like a phone number. The barb lands hardest on an age that confuses being informed with being educated, and education with being able to pass the pop quiz.