[Jach]

Historically, doctors and lawyers did teach themselves and many would sell their services without the appropriate papers. (Or the appropriate papers were obtainable through a test without requiring spending X amount of hours beforehand.) There's nothing fundamentally different about those fields as opposed to programming that make it so you can't learn the majority of the knowledge you'll need in the field from home. You can definitely diagnose without formal training--there's a story I heard of a guy who was having the signs and symptoms of a heart attack, googled them, realized he was having a heart attack, and called the ambulance. There's a book whose title I forget that describes in fine detail plumages, shapes, and other features about a huge variety of birds, but has no pictures, and it's commonly used by bird watchers to help them classify.

You may have an argument with biochemists since it's still a relatively new field, and specific universities are a decent place to find mentors, whereas historically you might just go seek a mentor from your local village or in the Big City for things like alchemy. The mentor may even have their own "School of Me", we don't have those anymore. Or maybe you might send a math paper to the Big Shot in Math in the UK, and if he likes it, he'll tell his circle of other math guys and suddenly you're "in" and will be recorded in the history books written by other people in the UK.

I think online media has revolutionized all fields of education and will continue to do so, but only in the simple way of making more correct information available and easier to acquire or recall. Self-learning is as old as books and online education only changes the source material from book to computer (which has a ton of benefits of course). I do agree with you that it is unlikely online education will ever completely replace having offline classes with other people, I know I would have preferred a programming mentor when I started out but all I had and knew of was a book. (It didn't occur to me then to seek out mentors at, say, a meetup.) The main reason I agree is because I don't foresee a decoupling of the university degree for a subject Y and a certification for doing Job X in a field sort of related to subject Y any time in the near future for many jobs, such as doctors and lawyers as you mentioned. What would be truly revolutionary for the Plebs is a mandate from the government saying HR departments can't require an accredited education, just as they can't require a particular race/sex/etc. (This won't stop discrimination of course just as the other mandates don't, but it would help I think even if it just dispels the notion that "I need a degree to get a job" that follows directly after "I need a high school diploma / GED to get into college.")

[ippisl]

From what i read, today's online learning is pretty social , not self learning.I guess that's a big part of what enables so many people to be successful in learning at home.