Doublespeak?

[Belacqua]

There are countless benefits to knowledge outside the professional sphere.

It's horrifying to me that this isn't obvious to everyone. And the subtext of the article is offensive. It really seems to advocate that a worker should be educated up to the level necessary to do his or her job, and after that there is no reason to learn. 

Such a view is anti-intellectual, anti-knowledge, and in my view, anti-what's good in life. 

It hasn't always been this way. 

In 18th and 19th century Britain (about which I've studied a little) university education was almost entirely for the sons of the wealthy, or training to be a parson. But people in the working and merchant classes were often very knowledgable, having spent their evenings reading and discussing actual good books. William Blake, for example, left formal schooling at 13 to apprentice to a printmaker. His father, who sold men's socks, approved. Yet Blake read on his own time and through his own motivation all the great philosophy that was available in English, and the classics of literature. 

The London intellectual circles in which he moved were full of such people. Thomas Taylor, for example, was an office clerk with no university education who taught himself Greek and became the most important translator of the century. Well-known intellectuals like Coleridge regularly spoke to sell-out crowds of "uneducated" people. The popular fiction of the day is today considered too hard for most people to read -- like Dickens. But Dickens had fans as passionate as Star Wars junkies, with far superior work. 

Walter Pater, an elite aesthete who influenced any number of non-elite people, wrote (paraphrasing): "education increases a person's capacity for pleasure." Today it seems that people believe the opposite. Education is only for money and pleasure has to be enjoyed with the mind switched off as much as possible. 

If you want to be cynical, this is another thing we can blame on the absolute triumph of capitalism, and its sole aim: exchange value. Far better to keep the workers stupid and focussed on idiocy like Game of Thrones.