(Part of the Art of Learning series.)

Video form December 10, 2025

It’s true that we forget many of the individual things we learn during our studies. That’s why it’s perhaps more important to remember how we learned than what we learned. In this talk, I revisit the competence we talked about the first talk, but from the perspective of how to use our full understanding of the “art of learning” to maintain both our knowledge and our ability-to-know things, our learning and our capacity to learn. The goal is to become and remain “knowledgeable” people.

“We are faced with the problem of error,” says Quine in From Stimulus to Science. This is something I have been increasingly emphasizing in my discussions with students and faculty about specifically academic knowledge. To know something “for academic purposes” is to be open to correction in a very explicit way. Since you know both what you know and and how you know it, you also know what to do if you find out that you are wrong about something. Being knowledgeable makes you better at learning from your mistakes.

In the talk, I quoted that line from the 2005 movie Kiss Kiss Bang Bang about the difference between feeling bad and feeling badly. The former suggests that you’re miserable, the latter that “the mechanism which allows you to feel is broken.” (I wrote about this scene elsewhere many years ago.) Naturally, I don’t wish either upon you, but the idea of keeping your mental and cordial apparatus (your concepts and your emotions, your mind and your heart) in good working order is really the core of my message in this talk. What Kenneth Burke said of literature we can say of education in general: it is “equipment for living”. There are a lot of moving parts and the university is a complex environment but it is possible, if you give yourself a few a deliberate moments every day to study, to get through it with a set of skills and a kit of tools that enables you, not just to accomplish your goals, but to enjoy it.

“Thine evermore,” as Hamlet says, “while this machine is to him.”

See also: “Academic Knowing (1)” & “Academic Knowing (2)”; “How School Works”; “Getting Better”; “The Moment”; and “1000 Weeks”. And have a look at the Craft of Research series too.