[Oblouk]

Agreed, I am currently attending a state school and very few of the professors emphasize the importance of self study. Learning to learn is more important than any piece of information college has to offer. The fact that MIT puts part of the learning burden on the student is another reason that the students go on to do great things. The professors are in part readying them for the real world.

[hga]

Part of the explicit ethos of MIT undergraduate education is that some significant fraction of what you're learning will be obsolete in due course, or irrelevant to what you end up doing, but at the very least the school is teaching you how to learn stuff quickly.