We concentrate as a nation, more than ever these days, on our formal education, in school, college, and university. Yet in a lifetime we probably learn more on our own, outside the system, large and little things, from matters of taste, in our recreation, home furnishings, and clothes, to matters of technology, in home computers, plumbing, or the way our cars and cameras work. I have been relishing lately how much museums have taught me, scarcely overlapping what went on in the classroom, and I've also been brooding over how little the new museums may be able to teach new generations.

The first time I visited New York's Museum of Modern Art, it was housed in several rundown brownstones with walk-up stoops, on 53rd Street just east of the still-running Sixth Avenue elevated train. The rooms were the original ones used by the families that had lived there. The lighting also was ordinary, dim by museum standards, yellow and homey. The work I seem to remember most specifically was, I think, by Marcel Duchamp, a small cagelike construction of thin wood pegs with cubes of sugar inside. I keep recalling it was named something like "Why Not Sneeze?" (although when I saw it years later, I realized it had another title altogether). It was typical of others I saw that afternoon when I was still in high school. One room had drawings and paintings by known artists side by side with those by asylum inmates. I was struck by the Museum's flaunting the parallels. It would be several years before I learned formally about Dada, surrealism, and abstract and action painting.

I've been back to the Museum dozens, perhaps hundreds of times, over the decades. I was an habitue long before it