Education Quote by Flora Lewis

A whole era of progress gets punctured in 14 words. Flora Lewis frames modern competence as a kind of amnesia: we can build, compute, extract, optimize, and weaponize, but we’ve misplaced the moral grammar that once justified doing any of it. The line works because it turns “learned” into an indictment. Learning is usually triumphant; here it’s clinical, even ominous. “Relearn” suggests we did know better, which makes the failure not ignorance but neglect.

Lewis wrote as a foreign correspondent and columnist during the late Cold War and the early years of globalization, when technical mastery was accelerating while political legitimacy felt shakier: nuclear deterrence, televised wars, bureaucratic empires, economic integration that promised prosperity and delivered dislocation. In that environment, “how” is the language of systems - policy tools, engineering feats, market mechanisms. “Why” is the language those systems quietly try to outsource to slogans.

The subtext is a warning about ends quietly being replaced by process. When institutions can always produce an answer, the harder question becomes who benefits, who pays, and what kind of society the answer assumes. Lewis isn’t anti-technology; she’s anti-autopilot. “Must try” is understated but urgent: the project is difficult because “why” isn’t a missing manual you can recover. It’s a civic argument you have to keep reopening, especially when the machinery is humming and telling you everything is under control.