ABSTRACT
Culture is a hollow word. Its meaning must always be a shade of meaning, varying from person to person and from place to place, since what it stands for is not an entity but a state of mind. As yet the culture-tester is in much the same position as Alfred Binet was when he first sought to measure mental faculties which were subsequendly shown to be illusory. The obvious danger in designing any measure of ‘Culture’, ‘general education’, ‘breadth’, is that the result will be no better than a quiz: amusing, yes, instructive, possibly, but ultimately pointless. A frequent and valid criticism of the tests produced so far has been that they fail to discriminate between genuine understanding and mere fact-grubbing. At the same time, it is not altogether true that Culture has nothing to do with scraps of information. It depends on the scraps.
