As a non-financially focused pursuit, however, I’m right with you. The day I don’t learn something new is the day I die, etc.

http://www.lawschool.cornell.edu/faculty/bio.cfm?id=422

http://ww3.lawschool.cornell.edu/faculty/faculty_cvs/Herstein.pdf

You are right that the other article was written by a philosopher.

Admittedly, access to actually useful law review articles is better than ever thanks to the internet.

However, I find it difficult to square this with the role that a lot of these conversations end up playing as part of bigger arguments about supporting education as a public good. Aside from the merits of the teach-your-self model, I think there is a bigger reason for why groups like the gates foundation are supporting the idea of DIY education. Ex http://diyubook.com/ And I think that it is largely part of Gene Glass’s diagnosis of the trajectory of educational reform in Fertilizers, Pills & Magnetic Strips. In short, DIY education fits very nicely as part of an argument for defunding education as a public good.

Like I said, I think this is really exciting stuff, and I want to be on board, but I also am hopeful that we can come up with ways to think about integrating this kind of education with public education, if only to help more broadly provide opportunities and show the possibilities to people who won’t otherwise be aware of them.

I realize that this public good argument is much less of a concern at the graduate level than at each previous level of education, but there are similar arguments being made about undergraduate education as well.

I wanted to comment on a slippery little passage in the original post, though: “Graduate school is primarily about credentialling for particular professional objectives…If the goal is to pick up a new bit of concrete knowledge or skill, there are other and better ways to do it. If the goal is to extend a lifelong engagement with knowledge and critical thinking, graduate school will generally get in the way.”

(1) Credentialling is related to professionalization; it usually serves to restrict access to a profession, for reasons having more to do with status and cultural clout than safety. (Historically, excluding women has been part of the project, too; the AMA arose in part as a reaction to the growing number of midwives taking care of pregnancy and childbirth and thus eating into physicians’ potential client base.) Although you’re right that safety can be used to justify professionalization, the latter does not guarantee the former: just think of all the unhealthy trends that have been promulgated by MDs; the high rate of iatrogenic illness; the startling rates of morbidity and mortality from prescription drugs (which are, in essence, credentialled or authorized substances). In any case, grad schools produce far more PhD’s, especially in the humanities, than universities can produce faculty positions. No need to restrict access through credentials here.

(2) Does anyone go to graduate (as opposed to professional) school to learn “a concrete knowledge or skill?” This sounds to me more like learning a craft. But grad school should be a great place in which to get intensive training in how to think and write, how to devise good research questions, how to judge sources, etc., in addition to developing relationships with colleagues. It’s much harder after the student phase to find people to pay close attention to your writing/thinking.

(3) Academia has its problems, but to say that graduate school “gets in the way of” a lifelong engagement with learning and critical thinking is going a tad too far. Only a small minority of people go to grad school; most these days go into the corporate world. Business is certainly the dominant culture—think how often we hear Americans referred to as “consumers” or “workers” instead of citizens—but it is not exactly known for self-criticism and ongoing humility before the vast realm of the unknown. Indeed, practical capitalist types poke fun at the caution that characterizes academic discourse. The fact that completing undergraduate and professional (MD, JD, DDS, and MBA) programs tends to correlate with conservative voting, even in this whacky decade, indicates either that there is a self-selection process for the students who choose those paths, and that most of them are not challenged in their beliefs, or that the students go in without a particular predilection but find conservative ideology more palatable after their training. Graduate school may not achieve enough in getting people to think critically, but it sure beats the alternative.

Now I work for a university, and as a perk I can take classes in almost anything. But I don’t, because I believe I can learn more efficiently by myself.

I think that for a well-rounded autodidact, school should be another tool in the toolbox. Consider learning a foreign language: You can learn to read and write by yourself, and you can find partners on the Internet and learn to speak and understand. But empirically, most people who try to learn a language by themselves fail, either through a dropoff in motivation or through lack of understanding of how to learn. Some can succeed, but for most people I recommend finding a good class, partly because it will help keep your motivation up.

The philosopher was looking for a job as a law school professor though. The application of Derek Parfit’s utilitarian ethics to law is interesting but not anything lawyer really needs to know.

There is a belief system at elite law schools that values the abstract over the practical. It is hard to weed out since to move toward the practical risks reducing the status of the law school. The effects of good grades from an elite law school sure are practical enough.