With the recent talk about how Artificial Intelligence is about to replace everything we do – relegating us to universal unemployment and a lifetime of diminished perspicacity, I find myself reflecting upon the tangible benefits of formal education.

I begin my enquiry by emphasizing the difference between it (formal education) and the self-taught model of the autodidact. The latter is irrefutably an ambitious and invariably productive pursuit. Very often the autodidact is motivated not by prestige or even technical qualification but by mere curiosity and an appetite for exploration, expansion or improvement. It must however be denoted that the imperatives of exactness, precision and research do not prevail. Self-knowledge is, by contrast to formal education, unabashedly personal and far less demanding of efficiency or other critical pragmatism.

The next distinction I wish to