Stephen Downes

Amid all the nonsense on this web site there is one good intuition, plucked out of the air by Kende Kefale. Here it is: "A university is not a platform; it is a heat engine. Its function is to take the raw, chaotic potential of a student's mind and subject it to the intense resistance of difficult ideas, harsh critiques, and immovable deadlines. This process denatures the student's prior assumptions, allowing them to re-fold into higher-order structures of thought." Now of course you don't need a university to pose challenge and hardship to a student; for most of us, life does that, but if you're rich and cultured, this needed to be produced artificially. It functions essentially as a Boltzmann machine, a well-known neural network training mechanism shaking up existing comfortable connections in the mind, and through a process of annealing, producing a more stable and resilient network structure.