The Martyr

I was reading up a little bit about autodidactism on Wikipedia the other day and found a story that made me a bit wary. The story is found in the Mahabharata, a Hindu epic detailing the history of India. It goes about like this, according to our benevolent wiki'ers:

"Ekalavya is depicted as a tribal boy who was denied education in the science of arms from royal teachers from the house of Kuru. Ekalavya went to the forest where he taught himself archery in front of the image of the Kuru teacher, Drona, that he had built for himself. Later, when the royal family found that Ekalavya had practised with the image of Drona as his teacher, Drona asked for Ekalavya's thumb as part of his tuition. Ekalavya complied with Drona's request, thus ending his martial career."

It's about enough to make any autodidact - or pandidact - quiver in his boots, much less one who is attempting to start a revolution. My hope is that the university system - which does have, to a degree, a monopoly on education much like the Kuru house - is not as malicious as the Kurus proved themselves to be.

I've pondered from time to time whether this endeavour that I am embarking upon is a rallying cry for socialism. And my thought-out response is that it is not. I am a capitalist at heart. Ludwig von Mises and Friedrich Hayek (whose work together earned Hayek a Nobel Prize in 1974) described capitalism as a system where efficiency is rewarded when we throw money at it and inefficiency is punished when we decline to throw money at it (I got that information, once again, courtesy of Wikipedia). Well, since the 1980s, at least the federal government seems to be indicating that the higher educational system as it stands today is inefficient, for it declines - more and more consistently each year - to throw money at colleges.

But the current system is pretty resilient, and it is pretty powerful. It's an enormous rock on the beach of the educational market, and the rest of us are mere specks of sand. Should one of us decide to take the boulder down, they could easily be crushed. I would hope that an institution designed to improve the lot of humankind wouldn't be so misanthropic as to annihilate an innovator committed to reforming it. But the possibility is there.

There is a better way to try to fix the system, however. If just one more grain of sand, one more Ekalavya, was willing to find a better way, then perhaps one more would join, until the entire beach could take on the resilient rock of higher education. I don't mean to say that burying the system is in short order. But it could use a little bit of good erosion, a little shaping, to say the least. Well, it could probably stand to be broken in half and then endure some intense sculpting. But the market can do it.

So... is there a possibility that a given university could refuse to reward a degree to someone - who has learned the relevant material without having spent a single hour in a classroom - for no other reason than to protect its own self-interest? Yes. But even if they do, I hope it could garner enough attention to indicate that a change must be made. And someday, we won't all have to walk around thumbless as a price for our genius.