Culture is activity of thought, and receptiveness to beauty and humane feeling.
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of information have nothing to do with it. A merely well-informed man is the most useless
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on God"s earth. What we should
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at producing is men who
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both culture and expert knowledge in some special direction. Their expert knowledge will give them the ground to start
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, and their culture will lead them as
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as philosophy and as high as
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. We have to remember that the valuable
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development is self-development, and that it
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takes place between the ages of sixteen and thirty. As to training, the most important part is given by mothers before the age of twelve.
In training a child to activity of thought, above all things we must
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of what I will call "inert ideas"—that is to say, ideas that are merely
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into the mind without being
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, or tested, or thrown into fresh combinations. In the history of education, the most
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phenomenon is that schools of learning, which at one epoch are alive with a craze for genius, in a
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generation exhibit merely pedantry and routine. The reason is that they are overladen with inert ideas. Except at
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intervals of intellectual motivation, education in the past has been radically
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with inert ideas. That is the reason why
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clever women, who have seen much of the world, are in middle life so much the most cultured part of the community. They have been saved from this horrible
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of inert ideas. Every intellectual revolution which has ever stirred humanity
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greatness has been a
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protest against inert ideas.
A．violent
B．passionate
C．exempt
D．idealistic
