“There are undeniably certain kinds of knowledge that must be of a general nature and, more importantly, a certain cultivation of the mind and character that nobody can afford to be without. People obviously cannot be good craftworkers, merchants, soldiers or businessmen unless, regardless of their occupation, they are good, upstanding and – according to their condition – well-informed human beings and citizens. If this basis is laid through schooling, vocational skills are easily acquired later on, and a person is always free to move from one occupation to another, as so often happens in life.” https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Humboldtian_model_of_higher_...

I’m also not sure what you mean. What is Anglo style education? I feel like my university experience in the US is heavily Humboldtian [1] in two specific ways: the general education requirements which explicitly stated goals of producing world citizens and teaching broad non-vocational reasoning skills and history lessons, and second, doing research as an undergraduate and later as a graduate, in research universities.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Humboldtian_model_of_higher_ed...

Also curious what you mean by thinking of education as an investment being part of the problem. What is the problem, and why does framing education as investment contribute? Are you talking about purely financial forms of investment? Education is widely viewed as social, cultural investment by society, as well as economic investment, and this is widely agreed to be a good thing, isn’t it? At the personal level, education is also viewed as a career & future financial security investment, and this also seems reasonable, no? I feel like the most important investment my education bought me was the freedom to choose my career path over time. Had I not gone to university, I do believe my choices would be more constrained than they are today.

What do you mean? Italy has applied the Bologna reforms, that were even named after an Italian university, no?

Yea, but for them at least the lower levels remain fairly classical, right?

that would be surprising.

ther are a usually few general courses (civics, economics, etc) at every undergrad, but these are usually low quality, mostly useless, and absolutely dwarfed by the usual introductory classes (usual STEM for STEM, etc)

for example https://offertaformativa-unitn-it.translate.goog/it/l/inform...

Italian universities still fail students liberally and repeatedly.