Some excerpts:
“The methods of teaching are essentially the same as those used in high school, only more so. The curriculum is an embodiment of disintegration — a hodgepodge of random subjects, without continuity, context or purpose. It is like a series of Balkanized kingdoms, offering a survey course of floating abstractions or an overdetailed study of a professor’s favorite minutiae, with the borders closed to the kingdom in the next classroom, with no connections, no bridges, no maps. Maps — i.e. systematization — are forbidden on principle. Cramming and memorizing are the students’ only psycho-epistemological means of getting through. (There are graduates in philosophy who can recite the differences between the early and late Wittgenstein, but have never had a course on Aristotle. There are graduates in psychology who have puttered about with rats in mazes, with knee-jerking reflexes and with statistics, but never got to an actual study of human psychology.)”

I enjoyed your letter greatly and wish I knew the drone pilot. As for advanced degrees in bubble-blowing, as one critic put it…all they take is time and some way to support one’s self and pay tuition while being bored–or worse, while taking one’s self seriously.

I bought a Ph.D in “Metaphysics” (my basic degree being in Philosophy) and I STILL think it is a terrific sociological commentary and joke. To me, “Doctor” will always mean an MD, a veterinarian, or a Dentist. We Jose Ortega y Gasset types learn on our own because we WANT to know. We work on our erudition life long. We make our own success. We march to a lot of different drummers. Isn’t it fun?! Write again, please? Linda

>>The humanities PhD, to take one sacred example, is hard-earned certification signifying the mastery of book-centered research supporting a body of learned expertise, but what happens when book-centered research is made redundant by the search engine, and expertise is not learned but Googled? <<

In another casual reading, the head of a new technical college in Silicon Valley noted that a lot of the students "taking" some of the advanced courses knew enough to teach them.

The most accomplished Air Force drone pilot is a high-school drop-out who got the job through his, and our, good luck. After a tour in Afghanistan, he is now training other drone pilots and the Air Force is questioning the necessity of insisting that their pilots all be officers (I know, there is more to flying an airplane than stick and rudder, I usta do it).

I learned early-on to learn what I needed to know when I needed to know it. It helps being a voracious reader. Buy all the gold you cn afford, the world is changing in ways none of us can either imagine or control