Task

Why do some people continue studying long after they leave school? Several reasons, and I think they've shifted over time. The obvious one is economic — qualifications expire in practical terms, so people retrain because their field has moved. But there's a second reason that gets less attention, which is that formal study gives structure to something people would otherwise never get round to. Buying a book about economics and actually reading it are very different commitments, and enrolling forces the second. Should governments pay for adult education, or should individuals? I'd say it depends on what the study is for, which sounds evasive but I think it's the honest answer. Where retraining is caused by an industry closing, the state has a reasonable interest in funding it, because the alternative is paying unemployment benefit for longer. Where someone studies for personal interest, it's harder to argue the public should carry the cost. The difficulty is that the two are not cleanly separable in practice. Is classroom teaching likely to disappear in the future? I'd be surprised. Predictions of that kind have been made about every technology since television, and what actually happened each time was that the classroom absorbed the tool rather than being replaced by it. What may well disappear is the lecture — one person talking to two hundred is the part that transfers to video without much loss. The seminar, where the value is in being interrupted, is much harder to replicate.