No Money, No Problem
“Libraries raised me,” Mr. Bradbury said. “I don’t believe in colleges and universities. I believe in libraries because most students don’t have any money. When I graduated from high school, it was during the Depression and we had no money. I couldn’t go to college, so I went to the library three days a week for 10 years.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/20/us/20ventura.html?_r=4&hpw
This is one of my major arguments against the casual way people assume you have to “go to college” to have a future. If higher education were free, I would still oppose it as the only choice or default choice. But, in fact, it’s quite expensive for most people. I keep hearing from people who have huge student loans they are paying off.
Like Ray Bradbury (a friend of my parents, years ago, though I don’t think I ever met him), I haunted a big library, soon after I quit high school. I lived in Chico, CA, for a while, where California State University has a campus. I used to love being there with all the books (500,000 of them).
Since that time, I have not had the opportunity to live near a really huge library, but I am surrounded by several thousand of my own books (Here’s my non-fiction collection). And, of course, I now have the Web, which Bradbury never dreamed of… except perhaps in tattoo form.
There are vast free resources out there for people who want to learn. Some things about Universities are nice, but they are not the only route to greatness, and are definitely not the best route for disruptive thinkers like me.
