I came to these obvious points embarrassingly late in life. “Nothing is so astonishing in education,” the historian Henry Adams once wrote, “as the amount of ignorance it accumulates in the form of inert facts.” Until that moment I had too often confused education with accumulating and cataloging facts. In Berlin, at the foot of the Brandenburg Gate, I began to realize that I had been a naïf. And so, at age 41, I set out, in a halting and haphazard fashion, to acquire a genuine education.
So writes Andrew Bacevich, American military historian and thinker.
Reminds me of a Marilyn Robinson line about people being intelligent/enlightened in little pockets, surrounded by seas of ignorance. Or words to that effect…
