Life changing or career building?

Its an interesting topic. I'm not going to pretend I know much about this topic, as I'm not a teacher nor am I anything to do with teaching. I haven't had any experience in the field, and my opinion is probably uneducated and therefore kind of irreverent. Were this a conversation in public, I wouldn't get involved- hahahahaha, who I am kidding? Of course I'd get involved. I'm opinionated about things I have no right to be opinionated on, and I'd probably just enjoy playing the devils advocate. But seriously, I don't know enough about it to really say. With that said, this is a blog, and you're expecting a response. So here goes.

To a point, we have to learn hard stuff, right? I mean, let me try and articulate that a little better. We have to learn certain things that we cannot be without. Equipping someone with the tools for self-learning is probably one of the best things you can do, but its tough, and sometimes it takes a long time for people to take the initiative and start learning themselves. For that reason, I believe there are core skills which should be taught regardless of anything else. This applies especially to creative industries like ours. You shouldn't force people down holes, because then you end up getting little replicas of the teachers, and ultimately nothing evolves. That's it, isn't it? Evolution. You need those random differences, and you need to encourage them in order to progress somewhere in the long run. Every student that is the same as its teacher, won't progress the system. A person must be more than just the sum of his or her learning, and has to expand for themselves. That kind of growth should be taken into account in the academic world, and I believe it is. Open ended projects like some of the ones we do, along with a focus on personal work, help students find identity and evolve! Progression is tough when you're given restrictions. As I said before though, we need rules god damnit! We need certain structures, systems people can't waver from at least until they have mastered the ground works. The games industry supposedly wants people who are highly trained, right? Well give them that! Its a difficult task no doubt, but you can be both highly trained and self-progressive. Its interesting that some members of the industry have been noted as saying they prefer employees with liberal arts backgrounds, because that would promote that self-progressive idea. But there is no reason that you can't have both. You can high train yourself before using those skills to better access and expand with your own concepts and ideas, and taking a more open approach to learning as a whole. Then you get the best of both worlds, and that would be an ideal employee. But they're hard to come by, because that kind of thing takes time. And time takes money, and money takes jobs, and jobs take a liberal art background or intense training, and so we're stuck. Stuck.

But I can't really comment.