There is a tendency to focus on information from certain figures, thinkers especially, which made them popular in the first place while neglecting what is seen as their secondary insights. In the case of Nietzsche, most people just talk about his writings on existentialism or his criticism that made him so widely known. The fact that he began his career as classical philologist who studied the Greek and Latin classics is regularly glanced over. This is common in many artists whose main contributions are what they dedicated their life's work to, say in architecture, though also having important things to discuss in other areas of life.
Albert Jay Nock is better known more for his libertarian writings, including his classics the polemic Our Enemy, the State and his (non)autobiography. His primary concern was the quality of civilization, the humane life as he would say. Nock knew that the subjects of politics and history were fundamental toward this understanding although not just those. He wrote a great deal concerning education, justice, literature, and general social criticism.
In regards to educational theory he made these keen observations:
Learning has always been made much of, but forgetting has always been deprecated; therefore pedantry has pretty well established itself throughout the modern world at the expense of culture.
Useless knowledge, on the contrary, gains value only as it is forgotten; and the point brought out is that useless knowledge alone is the concern of culture. Our definition, then, may be made more precise—perhaps as precise as any that can be made — if we put it that culture, considered as a process, means acquiring a vast deal of useless knowledge, and then forgetting it.
Forgetting? Useless knowledge? What? Both these concepts seem counter-intuitive.
Well, by just learning and not forgetting everything about a given subject(s) you end up getting caught up in the details—not seeing the forest for the trees. History is a prime of example of useless knowledge. Go ahead and try to learn all of history. Memorize every factoid, date, source, reference, etc... it's not only extremely laborious and basically impossible, to a certain point it leads to diminishing returns of understanding. The value of such knowledge which can't necessarily be applied like something that could be for example in engine mechanics or chemistry, looses its value if you keep it on the surface of your conscious thinking.
What's crucial when learning all sorts of useless knowledge is after learning as much as you can on the subject, you then forget it. Think how much pains all these moralists and people who want to make the world a better place go through everyday. You'll hear that, "in 1930s this and that occurred because of a certain sentiment which led to this and that travesty." All of these things might be true, but what is the point of bringing up relatively recent events in human history to light to try and determine a cause and effect?
Someone who has learned a great deal on the history of social thought and made sure to forget it all, can say with earnest that they don't remember the details of those events but they know that these types of things do happen going back to the times of the ancients. They will say, "there is nothing new under the sun, it's just the rehashed consequences of ideas that some people think is new and are intent on focusing toward." If culture was really established today, as well as understood as a process, we wouldn't constantly need to revert to pedantry wasting time trying to defend good ideas and purge bad ones.