Education Quote by Abigail Van Buren

Van Buren takes a familiar warning about half-knowledge and flips it with a columnist's instinct for lived reality. The old proverb ("a little learning is a dangerous thing") is usually a pat on the head: don't dabble, leave expertise to the experts. Her add-on punctures that smugness. Yes, partial knowledge can mislead, inflate ego, or turn curiosity into bad advice. But the bigger hazard, she suggests, is the sanctified emptiness of not knowing at all - the kind of ignorance that feels harmless because it never has to test itself against facts.

The line works because it’s both a concession and a rebuke. "True" disarms the pedants; she grants the premise, then widens the frame. The subtext is classic advice-column pragmatism: most people aren’t going to earn a degree before they have to vote, raise kids, navigate medicine, or decide what to believe. In that messy middle, incremental learning is not a vice; it’s a survival skill.

Context matters. Writing as "Dear Abby", Van Buren addressed anxiety, family conflict, health scares, and social norms in a pre-internet era when authoritative information was scarcer, and shame was a common substitute for education. Her quip defends the ordinary person’s right to ask, read, and try - even imperfectly. It’s a small democratic argument: curiosity beats resignation, and improvement beats purity.