[akiselev]

> Because educational institutions aren’t in the business of selling education: they give that away for free. Seriously, walk into any university campus and into a lecture hall, sit down and take notes. No one will stop you! No one will check ID. You can even talk to the professor and 99% of the time they’ll give you access to the course materials online at well.

Can confirm. When I was a senior in high school, a professor at Caltech even sponsored me as a visiting faculty member so I could check out books from the university libraries. No one in the administration even blinked an eye.

I ended up auditing several graduate aerospace classes like Ae105 & Ae121 and even worked on the AAReSt [1] thermal systems group project with several other graduate students who seemed to tolerate me most of the time. I still carry the ID around in my wallet as a keepsake.

[1] https://www.pellegrino.caltech.edu/aarest1

[jacurtis]

When I was in college, I was dating a girl who was taking a philosophy class that was particularly interesting to me. One day we were hanging out before her class and she was telling me about their discussions, and it covered some ideas I really enjoyed discussing. Since I was in computer science, I never got the opportunity to take a lot of humanities like Philosophy and so I mentioned that I wished I could take this class. She had to go to class and just said "you can come with me if you want".

I went with her and just sat down. I took notes, I participated in discussion, and ended up going back for several weeks. I eventually stopped going as they moved onto another chapter. I popped back in a few weeks later and the only thing the teacher said when they saw me come into the lecture hall was "hey it's good to see you again". The prof knew I existed but either didn't realize or didn't care that I wasn't actually on the class roll.

[jasmer]

That's fine though, and it's exactly how we would want it to be aka it's for the students but if someone is ernest they can just 'participate' in some thing. That's a positive outcome I can't fathom getting upset by that.

That said, showing up for a class isn't exactly 'an education' either.