William Yeats: "Education is not filling a bucket but lighting a fire."
Issue is, academic research is so focused on getting dollars from federal or corporate grants, filling the bucket is the norm. The dispassion within academia is heartbreaking.
Issue is, academic research is so focused on getting dollars from federal or corporate grants, filling the bucket is the norm. The dispassion within academia is heartbreaking.
It's a reaction to the system within which we live. We must have money to survive and thrive, and thus the vocation to which one devotes oneself is, at the very least partially, driven by the need to feed, clothe, shelter, and entertain oneself. Passion is a luxury for the well provisioned or the uniquely ascetic.
Consider: How many of us would be writing software for a living if it paid like a fry cook?
Just "survive" is too low a point to be interesting. You need way more than just surviving to have spare time and capacity to learn and innovate. And that level, at least in the western world, now comes with absurdly high costs of living (driven by the insanity of the real estate market), so even the "middle class" is mostly stuck running in a hamster wheel.