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0 pointsrayiner7y ago0 comments

Nothing ironic about it. Lawyers in the U.S. typically need seven years of education (a four-year college degree, and a three-year JD). In the U.K., they manage with a 3 to 4-year LLB. In the U.S., everyone is required to go to high-school through grade 12. In Germany, 40% of people finish at grade 10. Both the U.K. and Germany manage to have world class economies with substantially less education than the U.S. The U.S. is over educationalized, and part of the reason is that people are inundated with pablum like "education is almost invaluable."

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ashelmire7y ago

We were talking about the value of libraries and education, not university education.

I should come clean, I'm also a university employee. I do agree with you that we require too much formal education in many cases, and would add that the financial cost of university education in the US is outrageous. However, education, independent of universities, clearly has great value. Libraries in particular are very cheap; a single library can service many thousands of people with only a few employees.

Personally, I'd like to see industry embrace educational resources like Coursera, so we can move away from the expensive, often predatory university model that locks many fields behind golden gates.

TimJYoung7y ago

I agree with you 100%. However, I also think that libraries are one way that you can compensate for a lack of a formal education, and as pointed out here, they often serve as a physical refuge from the world that is important for learning. For example, I think that libraries should stock more textbooks in addition to regular books. Textbooks are, typically, a) very expensive, and b) very hard to track down, especially if they are older.

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