tertiary

this article on banks and universities gets a bit of a rise, but it's only a brick in the grand wall the old world has built to protect us from the new one.

if the internet is free then institutions like universities are going to go the way of the other dinosaurs. universities have become less and less about academic enquiry and education than about professional training and the upkeep of people and places who otherwise wouldn't be able to hack it.

i'm not suggesting abandoning the universities, but the massive bureaucratic black holes which students must test themselves out of really aren't as good a breeding ground for advanced ideas anymore. sure, there are exceptions, but even notable exceptions (like MIT) have been pushing info and lectures online because their livelihood is the research, not the bland and boring teaching of first year students.

i'm plenty glad for my exposure to excellent teachers throughout the classes i've been attending during the past two years, but i'm fully aware that while being physically in their presence contributed loads it wasn't crucial to the experience. we could have done just fine with a virtual classroom and video-conferencing, etc. heck, out of classes of near a hundred students only a handful of us ever opened our mouths anyway, and some of the physical presence was downright detrimental.

and as for libraries, don't get me started. the very idea that not all libraries are digital and open to the public is nothing short of offensive to me. universities have essentially become limiting agents instead of catalysts.

the future of education is in our hands; the internet has made it so. any trade, any skill, any principle can be learned online. any preliminary research can be performed and the real stuff should be available soon. all we need to know, and to teach our kids, is how to climb in, how to separate the wheat from the chaff... so, critical thinking and curiosity. all the rest can be up to the student.