The only education that is of importance is self-education. I have had the benefit, and the pain, of being taught by people as uncredentialed as local state schools and those from Oxford, Yale, and Columbia. In both cases, the greatest nutrition of the class was never found precisely in monologues or lectures given by the professor, but in my own self-study. Syllabuses are extraordinarily helpful, insofar as they act as a kind of channel through which to direct energy, which allows one to puncture a field for the first time, but as my time away from the university has taught me, funnily enough, is that you can create this syllabus yourself. The rest, the dialogue with other students (which I found to be mostly useless), the study hours with the professor (much more valuable than the class themselves, for various reasons), the time afforded to do nothing but study—well, all this is much more difficult to render beyond the campus. It can be stolen, however, if one puts effort into it, as I have, when I worked, in the after-hours of a shift, that night, or early in the morning. I would be thinking about the ideas even while I worked—considering a Platonic dialogue as I fashioned a gin and tonic, or the sinews and marrow of figurative language as I sculpted a martini with ice—shaken, not stirred—and spirits. This requires a level of devotion that most perhaps cannot recreate, but I must insist that it is necessary. I will speak in the following paragraphs not only about why education is vital to obtaining a free, agile, and dangerous mind, but how exactly you can direct this style of education without a professor or classroom. This will be, if anything, a work in progress on the antidote to the modern university, as well as a spear you can lance the throat of a demagogue with.
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