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it's a tautology to argue that smart people who value the life of the mind need to go to graduate school to hang around with smart people who value the life of

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  • telemachos 17y ago
    You're digging in, which is a natural response to a bunch of people disagreeing with you. Here's what I think you're missing. Although I am a pretty intellectually curious person, on my own and when working a separate full-time job, I can only do so much. When I was in graduate school, my job was to read, write and argue with other smart people who also spent all their time reading, writing and arguing (about a somewhat limited range of topics). I had very little else to do - often nothing else, if I wasn't a ta or lecturer. Graduate school isn't perfect (it's a mess in many ways, I think), and you can certainly lead one kind of life of the mind alone, but graduate school is an amazing way to immerse yourself in something. You can't replicate that experience easily, just because you have a library card.
  • andrewcooke 17y ago
    to be honest, i was just trying to explain what a tautology is. however, it's certainly not clear to me that someone who "values the inner life of the mind" is also the practical-minded kind of person who's going to sit down and organise the equivalent of a university class. in more general terms, this is "why cities matter". see, for example, http://www.tnr.com/book/review/why-cities-matter http://www.tnr.com/book/review/why-cities-matter - "the magic of urban density means that agglomerations of people come together for simple reasons and often achieve amazing things". for that kind of thing to happen you need to collect people together - at a large scale into cities, and at smaller scales into institutions. your average book club in podunk isn't going to be as academically stimulating as a class at yale.
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