[georgefox]

My apologies if I came across as making some sort of ad hominem attack here based on the grammar in your post. Let me re-iterate: for a non-native speaker, your English is very impressive. Sure, there were a few awkward phrasings and some grammatical errors in your post, but I think I'm much more sensitive to these things than most people are, and it in no way affected my ability to understand the message you were trying to convey. I just so happened to respond to the grammatical tangent in the comments here. :)

Honestly, the intent of my original comment was specifically to legitimize the non-grammar-related part of grot's comment. Looking back, I failed miserably at that, and the conversation centered even more on grammar. I distinctly remember having written something else that I apparently deleted before commenting. Let me go back and make a comment that's actually valuable.

> Of course you can read Plato or Homer or Augustine by yourself, but unless you're in a collegiate environment, it's very very easy to be lazy.

Personally, I can strongly relate to this. I'm very interested in literature, for example, but I'm not very well read. There are plenty of libraries around me and plenty of resources available on the internet to help me self-study, but I just don't do it. I can self-study node.js just fine, but I need some coercion to get into Shakespeare. This is something a formal education in liberal arts can provide. Whether or not it's affordable depends on a variety of factors, so it's hard to make a sweeping statement in support of or in opposition to such a degree. But I think people are very prone to looking at educational choices as business decisions, where a negative ROI is obviously bad. I think this is a limited perspective, but unfortunately, it's a reality a lot of people have to deal with.