What a university can provide is direction: an explicit decision about the order concepts are learned, and the perspective each concept is approached from.

That can be really useful, especially when professors have enough free time to spend with individual students.

It can also be really detrimental: every person has a unique education history that determines what order and perspectives are most optimal to their learning.

The problem I see is that university is structure. The entire design is intended to be predetermined and inflexible. Edge cases are handled by bringing a student "back on track", assuming that track to be the best learning approach for every student.

Most of the substance of "liberal arts" is exactly what a person needs to learn to progress out of this system. The irony of a successful university experience is that the more successful it is at teaching you, the sooner you can walk away and continue learning on your own.

> What a university can provide is direction: an explicit decision about the order concepts are learned, and the perspective each concept is approached from.

Also just touching on "these things exist", converting unknown unknowns into known unknowns. That's the single biggest thing I got from my degree (having already been programming for years before), that nowadays I'm occasionally reminded of in a relevant context and can now dig deeper into.

> We've had free public libraries for centuries now.

Not even a century and a half, really. The first Carnegie library was opened in 1883, for example.

I mean, pedantry aside this is such an easy question that even Google can find a result. [1]

According to that link: The Darby Free Library in Darby, Pennsylvania, is “America’s oldest public library, in continuous service since 1743.”

But really, without going too off topic, why would you even bother to try to correct a statement that is used for effect? Are you trying to suggest that 150 years vs "centuries" is a relevant distinction for a point made about college-aged knowledge seekers? Are you interested in showing you have the trivial fact on hand for when the first Carnegie library was formed?

I'm open to being corrected but sometimes I just have to shake my head. Not only was your attempt to correct irrelevant, it is factually off base.

1. https://www.sturgislibrary.org/oldest-library/

I contend that "We have had free public libraries" is not a statement about the mere existence of a public library somewhere, but rather and especially in the context of this discussion a claim about how widely available resources for self-education are. And that's firmly the latter half of the 19th century, following efforts of people like Buckingham, Edwards, and Carnegie. And these are still not even close to universally accessible - there can be plenty stopping "a 20 year old human who lives in Western society" from accessing them.

So, no, not pedantry - just asking that you genuinely consider the experiences of others before waxing poetic about some irrelevant historicism. Perhaps unguided education is today not as accessible for everyone as it was for you, for many reasons.

> Perhaps unguided education is today not as accessible for everyone as it was for you, for many reasons.

That is fair, I am too liberal with my hyperbole and so I'll try to be a bit more clear. It seems unlikely to me that an individual that has access to a guided university education does not also have access to freely available educational resources either online or in public libraries. That is, I do not believe that a youth today that desires to "grow an intellectual soul" has the single recourse to enroll in the structured environments of universities.

I have no idea how you clarifying or arguing over the precise duration of the availability of public libraries contributes to that discussion.

This statement:

There is literally nothing stopping a 20 year old human who lives in Western society from growing their intellectual soul through learning.

Is wildly different than:

I do not believe that a youth today that desires to "grow an intellectual soul" has the single recourse to enroll in the structured environments of universities.

> I have no idea how you clarifying or arguing over the precise duration of the availability of public libraries contributes to that discussion.

Sure, when you totally change what you're saying, it's not relevant anymore.

I hear it used to be that there was a culture of serious working-class learning in England. Like, the barbers in the shop would pay some street-kid to read them books -- there was no TV -- while they cut hair. And the cabbie could get into a conversation about Kant or something with his passenger. Maybe just to mess with them, but still.

The surprisingly intellectual cabbie is practically a trope. They get to talk to a lot of different people so can end up learning all sorts of things you wouldn't expect.

They also have to be pretty smart and able to study to get past the knowledge, so cabbies in London are often actually pretty intellectual people.

In Sweden you have https://www.abf.se/Om-ABF/In-English/

>There is literally nothing stopping a 20 year old human who lives in Western society from growing their intellectual soul through learning

Except for humans in general being utterly shite at pursuing learning without guidance or an immediate goal, both in regards to the learning effectiveness (i.e. how much you learn per amount of time or effort), and having the discipline to keep the grind

Most people are not, in fact, capable of just going to a library (or using the internet) every day and deeply learning a subject. They need an external force to actually keep grinding, even if they do want to do it by themselves

Also learning is more than just reading a whole lot. Not every field or subject us software development where the tools you need to actually do are so easily accessible accessible.

Of course there's something stopping them from learning.

It's called their own lack of understanding. Take virtually any topic about anything and do a search for it on the internet. If it's even remotely controversial, there will be thousands of pages screaming at each other in opposition to each other. Meanwhile, the academics who are doing actual research are sitting over there in the quiet corner, making an attempt to cut through the bullshit.

It definitely gets easier to cut through the bullshit on your own once you've been around the block a few times, but that's as an actual adult with an actual education, not a child who doesn't know much about anything or a man-child who can be convinced to believe the truthiness of a topic.

The internet is a problem because actual knowledge is often boring. There's no controversy in many fields amongst scholars because they've either exhausted the research on a topic or there's so much data supporting the general consensus that it's not likely to budge. People don't get excited about knowing the things that everyone should know. They get excited about knowing the hot, new thing regardless of whether it's even verifiable or valid.