Who Needs School?

I’ve mentioned MITs OpenCourseware before (somewhere–I’m not looking for it right now). Such things are widely available all over the web. For example, THE work on systems analysis, Herman Kahn’s Techniques of Systems Analysis, is available as a free download from the Rand Corporation.

With such sites as Project Gutenberg and many other organizations and universities making literature and courses available for free, anyone with the mental horsepower, the desire and access to a computer or a public library (most have computers available now) can have not only the usual library resources available but a world of educational enrichment at their fingertips.

I used to haunt the public libraries where we lived when I was a kid. School libraries all the way through grad school , most definitely ALL the school libraries I could reach–collections varied. *heh* I needed “The Second Sex” for a research paper once and the ONLY copy available in five college libraries (and two public) consulted was Le Deuxieme Sexe. Right. In French. Thanks to a good French prof, that was OK. (Of course, it was also fun when the prof asked me to translate material I cited. *heh* What? Didn’t think I’d actually read the horrible book? Simone de Beauvoir was one kinky, twisted woman. Still, I’d probably have been less critical of the book had I not known her history.)

Anywho… off the rabbit trail, now and back on track. If you’ve not learned anything new today, you’ve wasted your time so far. Go. Learn. Grow.

(OK, I’ll admit that formal schooling has its uses, but the way public schools (AKA, “prisons for kids”) are going and the manner in which colleges and universities have become low-class diploma mills for sub- and illiterates, the value of such things is rapidly approaching large negative numbers. Trade schools and such like: great for training, not so much for education–and yes, the two are very different things.)

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