When you read a book, fiction or non-fiction, you are immersed in another man's mind and thought for a considerable period of time and see the world through his eyes and interpret it through his logic. If he is a sound thinker and a good writer, that point of view embeds itself in your mind in subtle ways. Even if you don't agree with him, and even many years later after you have forgotten many of the details, that writer's thought has become part of yours. If the book is one that has been read by many others, and especially through long periods of history (what we call the "classics"), you become part of the shared intellectual experience of the human race.

This is what is meant by "education". You don't have to be a religious person to get something out of the Bible, and you need not be a Nazi to read Mein Kampf, or a Communist to read Das Kapital. And why do the the lives and deeds of Homer's Bronze Age warriors still hold such relevance for us after three thousand years? And you are a fool if you do not read Plato, but a bigger fool if you take him seriously! These are important books because they form part of the tapestry of ideas that define us as a culture and as a species. And the wonderful thing is that books become a part of you, long after you have forgotten the details.

After re-reading Heinlein's "Starship Troopers" and "Citizen of the Galaxy" as an adult, I came to realize how much these books had influenced me without my even realizing it, even though I did not share all, or even most of, the author's beliefs. But I did share some, and I had an understanding of the others, which gave me the advantage of some of the man's insights and thought. It also gave me a powerful insight into the the thought of those who subscribe to some or all of his beliefs. Listening to advice is always a good thing, even if you choose not to take it.

The modern trend to reduce all knowledge and human action to factoids and exclusive, self-contained systems and ideologies, to try to cast all complex and subtle issues into verifiable propositions (perhaps the one unfortunate result of the historical success of scientific method) is a dangerous and myopic way of looking at the world. Human truth is not based on verifiable propositions, or described by symbolic formalisms; it is self-referential, subjective, relative and often contradictory. Like every other human activity, thinking can only be learned in two ways: practice, and watching others do it.

The purpose of education is not to teach you what you need to know, it is to teach you how to think.