>I'm not sure what you mean with "nonexisting". Attended by fewer people? If so, yes. Still, a century ago (and quite a lot more for that matter), there were ex

>I'm not sure what you mean with "nonexisting". Attended by fewer people? If so, yes. Still, a century ago (and quite a lot more for that matter), there were excellent universities and great curriculums, of the kind that put a lot of modern university curriculums to shame. I'm talking about K-12 and the notion of public schools as well not just universities themselves. >To put it in another way, a 20 year old with full access to the Internet, is not (as a sum of his and the internets information) smarter and wont be more productive than Einstein or Bertrand Russell. I was implying nothing of the sort. I see it as those who would never have the type of access to the infrastructure associated with our educational system (you know, K-12, free lunch, public transportation, student loans, and etc), could learn how to evaluate information without the aid of a such an institutionalized system (and even as the cost of the degree goes up, most americans are going to essentially be priced out of even mediocre universities if they don't want to live their productive lives paying student loans if they can get a job not soon to be automated by computers/robots, of course, for the chance [seeing as students today are lacking this ability even with the degree according to this author] to learn how to evaluate information with patience). The 20 year olds I sat in class with during MatSci seemed to equate evaluating information with regurgitating what the professor regurgitated from his lecture notes that he wrote up and posted online in the previous years, and seemed so incompetent when unable to apply their "evaluation skills" when trying to etch/dope wafers in lab (but able to deftly copypasta a lab report together with their peers for that good ol' "A"). >Most of them (of what I've read in biographies and interviews) attribute their success to hard work and study, which sure sounds like "patience" to me. Curiosity without patience = Reddit. Notice how I wrote "…would attribute their success to their patience (or being told that they should be patient) before their own curiosity." and not "Curiosity without patience" as I noted before that when I qualified the circumstance where patience would be valuable in this context.