(01-10-2019, 08:21 AM)Bill the Piper Wrote: I learned more from Wikipedia, Orion's Arm and forums like this than from my formal education.
On the other side, I believe that my formal education made me more effective in using the rich lode of reference material such as Wikipedia and made me a better user of language on Forums of any kind and able to get more out of the discussions on the Internet. The biggest positive was that I met people from national and cultural backgrounds very different from mine (I miss them in the dreary hick town in which I feel stranded) who often had interesting tales to tell. Yes, Chile under Pinochet was not as bad as America media told us that it was -- it was even worse!
But even attending high school in the San Francisco Bay Area was quite a learning experience for things other than academics. I may have had some huge cultural clashes as a junior, but paradoxically those were mostly with white kids who were vile racists and could not understand why I didn't join in -- and with dopers, also mostly white. I got along best with Asians and (rather ironically, as I am a German-American) with Jews. I saw rather few blacks (such few as I met were OK), and most of the Hispanics were poorly assimilated in the 1970s. On the other hand there was a brilliant and attractive girl with the surname Bettencourt who was extremely proud of her Spanish heritage and, had I ended up with her, would surely have assimilated me into her culture. Back then I recognized racism as something for schmucks and scum.
A good college education makes one more open-minded and more adept with language. Both are highly desirable in practically any commercial or bureaucratic setting. Maybe one is not so open-minded toward drugs, bigotry, and demagoguery, but those are obviously for fools. The tragedy is not that someone with a college education finds that work on an assembly line pays better than being a salesclerk in a department store; the educated fellow who works on assembly line might do much good for his fellow workers as a shop steward during a union-management negotiation.
The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated Communist but instead the people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists -- Hannah Arendt.