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William Yeats: "Education is not filling a bucket but lighting a fire." Issue is, academic research is so focused on getting dollars from federal or corporate

William Yeats: "Education is not filling a bucket but lighting a fire." Issue is, academic research is so focused on getting dollars from federal or corporate grants, filling the bucket is the norm. The dispassion within academia is heartbreaking.

rjbwork 3y ago
>The dispassion within academia is heartbreaking. It's a reaction to the system within which we live. We must have money to survive and thrive, and thus the vocation to which one devotes oneself is, at the very least partially, driven by the need to feed, clothe, shelter, and entertain oneself. Passion is a luxury for the well provisioned or the uniquely ascetic. Consider: How many of us would be writing software for a living if it paid like a fry cook?
- rednerrus 3y ago
  It's cheaper/easier now to survive than any other time in history. The other thing that should be driving innovation/education is that knowledge is cheaper now than any other time in history. The combination of these two things should be driving innovation at an unparalleled pace. We're probably just behind the curve here and we are likely to see another massive explosion of innovation.
  - TeMPOraL 3y ago
    > It's cheaper/easier now to survive than any other time in history. Just "survive" is too low a point to be interesting. You need way more than just surviving to have spare time and capacity to learn and innovate. And that level, at least in the western world, now comes with absurdly high costs of living (driven by the insanity of the real estate market), so even the "middle class" is mostly stuck running in a hamster wheel.
    - rednerrus 3y ago
      Running on the hamster wheel is a choice people make. If you wanted to you could live in a LCOL city and work remotely. People want to live in HCOL cities and in bigger fancier houses than they need, they drive bigger fancier cars than they need to, they take fancier vacations than they need to. Obviously this isn't true for everyone but through the middle and upper middle class, it certainly is true.
earthboundkid 3y ago
Plato also has Socrates dismiss the education as filling a bucket metaphor in the Republic. Of course, his solution was trippier (all knowledge is just the remembrance of the Soul's flight to realm of Ideas).

rjbwork 3y ago

>The dispassion within academia is heartbreaking. It's a reaction to the system within which we live. We must have money to survive and thrive, and thus the vocation to which one devotes oneself is, at the very least partially, driven by the need to feed, clothe, shelter, and entertain oneself. Passion is a luxury for the well provisioned or the uniquely ascetic. Consider: How many of us would be writing software for a living if it paid like a fry cook?

rednerrus 3y ago
It's cheaper/easier now to survive than any other time in history. The other thing that should be driving innovation/education is that knowledge is cheaper now than any other time in history. The combination of these two things should be driving innovation at an unparalleled pace. We're probably just behind the curve here and we are likely to see another massive explosion of innovation.
- TeMPOraL 3y ago
  > It's cheaper/easier now to survive than any other time in history. Just "survive" is too low a point to be interesting. You need way more than just surviving to have spare time and capacity to learn and innovate. And that level, at least in the western world, now comes with absurdly high costs of living (driven by the insanity of the real estate market), so even the "middle class" is mostly stuck running in a hamster wheel.
  - rednerrus 3y ago
    Running on the hamster wheel is a choice people make. If you wanted to you could live in a LCOL city and work remotely. People want to live in HCOL cities and in bigger fancier houses than they need, they drive bigger fancier cars than they need to, they take fancier vacations than they need to. Obviously this isn't true for everyone but through the middle and upper middle class, it certainly is true.

earthboundkid 3y ago

Plato also has Socrates dismiss the education as filling a bucket metaphor in the Republic. Of course, his solution was trippier (all knowledge is just the remembrance of the Soul's flight to realm of Ideas).