I suppose education being a sign of prestige was a symptom of knowledge being difficult to replicate. Books used to take a lot of knowledge and skill to reprodu

I suppose education being a sign of prestige was a symptom of knowledge being difficult to replicate. Books used to take a lot of knowledge and skill to reproduce and were therefore rare and expensive. So the greatest benefit of attending a university was access to its library. In today's information society it's now hard for anyone to prevent the copying of what can be stored in computer files. Because information was difficult to obtain, what was actually useful wasn't easy to identify and students relied on authority figures to tell them what was and what wasn't. Those authority figures themselves often had unsystematic and biased viewpoints which they then passed on to the next generation. Years ago, Latin grammar was the gold standard by which all other languages were judged (perhaps as a legacy of the Roman empire). English grammar, along with that of most other world languages, is somewhat structurally different to Latin and difficult to shoehorn into the Latin model. In my opinion this has had a detrimental effect on multinational relations. Linguistics as a whole has only in the last few decades escaped from the missteps caused by classical education, with the rise of computer science and computer assisted comparative linguistic models. Google switched to other methods than those of traditional grammar for Google Translate and saw greater utility for end users as a result. Perhaps the results aren't especially idiomatic to the target language, but they have been very useful. Maybe classical education was never that useful relative to what's available now and those who prize it have stockholm syndrome, perhaps with some rationale like "I had to go through it in my day, so students of today should too". I think any attempt to maintain a scarcity of knowledge artificially now would be counter productive.