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Originally Posted by ann ashtray
The whole university system is a joke. Do I think it should be "free", no...not necessarily. If you feel the need to get an education for A) the sole purpose of your own career advancement, or B) don't know how to educate yourself with such a wide array of tools made available to us (libraries, the internet) you might as well be paying for it.
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I think the idea that the solitary function of education is for the market is erroneous. I can understand people getting hacked off with students having a good time at the taxpayer's expense, but if all university is is training for the marketplace then you have a much duller culture. I make the exception for directly and unequivocally vocational courses like medicine.
The other thing is that it simply isn't the case that people can educate themselves with libraries and the internet. I have a degree in philosophy. As we all know, this amounts to roughly fuck all in real, economic terms. But if I was left floundering in my local library, my philosophical horizons would expand no further than the usual suspects - Sartre, Plato - and even if I did come across Hegel, there's no way I'd have the critical tools to engage with him. And that's not to mention those figures you only really come across by meeting people who know a lot about a subject. I can't imagine anyone has ever come across heterodox Chinese economics and Feyerabend in the same week entirely by accident. Both expanded my horizons, one of them largely forgotten. From another perspective, I've never studied music and it's taken me far, far longer to come to terms with R Strauss and Sibelius when most composition students get to grips with them in their first year.