[kostya-kow]

Most of the knowledge you will ever need you can attain for free on Internet with MOOCs.

And some of the more advanced concepts that you mentioned are not beneficial to know for majority of things you will do in day-to-day work, although I bet you can still learn a lot of it for free with online e-books.

If you want to do research on some really advanced topics then a degree is a must, but an average (high-)school education is a complete waste of time.

[rcfox]

That knowledge didn't just appear once there was an internet; it had to come from somewhere. You're able to make geo-local picture sharing apps inside of instant messengers because someone with an advanced degree figured out how to make transistors. Then some other person with an advanced degree figured out how to make combinations of those transistors perform coherent operations to achieve complex goals. Then some other person with an advanced degree distilled the mathematical theories required to parse languages. And so on.

It's fine to say that you're getting by just fine with stuff you learned on the internet, but to call education a waste is to declare that what we have now to be sufficient and there's no point in learning anything new. That might be working for the Amish, but it doesn't work for me.

[kostya-kow]

You are strawmanning. I wasn't claiming that all the knowledge that comes from people with advanced degrees is useless.

Most people don't need an advanced degree to contribute to society. Proportionally, only a small number people are needed to make transistors and develop mathematical concepts for computers compared to the amount of people using their work.

While it is necessary to have people with PhDs conducting research to have progress, hackers and doers (which base their work on the research) are also needed to exploit the results of research.

It is also possible to not have a degree and still succeed in life, and do things that you love.

Moreover, I think that nowadays it is becoming easier to get knowledge (that traditionally was only accessible in Universities) for free on Internet. I think traditional education system is extremely limiting and archaic. It permits people which excel in only certain kind of environments to conduct research.