A Classical Education Is Not an Education

The word culture has spread from the halls of anthropology to infect us all. Culture now is any chunk of social reality you like or dislike, i use it in this its sociological sense - though i trust arely enough and judiciously. It not only exfoliates before our eyes, it excuses ignorance and inoculates the ignorant from any responsibility to know anything beyond their kith and kin. Without a finely tuned and oft nourished sense of the past, both near and distant, we have no culture. And immediately we are thrown into another thicket. What do we mean by these mushy words, culture and cultural? This requires clarifying and maybe a little fumigating.