In both the Apology and the Republic, Plato has Socrates issue the Delphic command: “Know Thyself.” Throughout the dialogues, Plato, for himself as well as for his teacher Socrates, issues another command: “Question everything.” I had the great good fortune of attending Christian Brothers Academy, CBA to its devotees, in Lincroft, New Jersey, where both commands were embedded in our education. CBA was, and is today, an all-boys high school that offered a college prep curriculum and so much more. As I remember our second day of classes, our homeroom teacher, Brother Brian, rolled up the sleeves of his cassock, which always meant business, stared at us for a moment, then asked: “How many of you were taught by the nuns?” From where I sat, all hands were raised. He paused and then said: “Well forget everything they taught you.”

Forget? What did Brother Brian mean? How could we forget? After all, we just graduated from primary school. And, isn't the purpose of education to remember all that we had learned? Was he simply taking a not-so-sly dig at the nuns? Was he otherwise preparing us for a different regimen of thought, a regimen taught by the Christian Brothers? Or did he have a deeper purpose? Was he challenging us to unlock the psychological mysteries of education, which, as revealed by Milan Kundera and Jorge Luis Borges, require memory and forgetting? Perhaps all of the above.