Max said: I guess that what I am trying to say is that I agre with your THIRST TO LEARN theory. I feel parents are still the best educational resource children have, and that when parents play their part well, even those of us without tertiary education need not feel "unlearned and ignorant."
Max, tertiary education is a system, not a guaranteed path to knowledge. I was an academic for several years (before I decided that filthy lucre was important, after all), and I reckon that I learned as much from my students, who were mostly adult, as they learned from me.
The nice thing about teaching adults is that they are there to learn. You don't have to get them to pay attention. You don't have to keep them in after class to learn their times tables. Many of my students came from economically disadvantaged backgrounds. Quite a number of them asked me "how do I learn?", since it was the first time since school that they had been in an educational institution as students. I was always pretty hard-put to think of what to say. They had come a long way - learned the need to learn - just to be there.
Tertiary education provides a framework in which to study and the resources to do so. If you can provide your own framework and have access to a good library, you don't need tertiary institutions at all, unless the piece of paper at the end is your main goal.
OP
