Free Education vs Paywall Middlemen – A proposal towards a better learning system

I recently came across a post that explained why the company was putting an end to their free courses. "We noticed that people who opt for the free ones don't complete them", was the argument mentioned in adding a paywall to all their knowledge base. This is one of the themes that's often talked about when it comes to free – "people don't pursue it with all their hearts if it's free" and "when people pay for it, they at least put the time to try."

Imo, if you want to ask money for your product, just do it. It's ok to acknowledge when the initiative moves from being vision-driven to business-driven. There's nothing wrong with it. In the real world, survival eventually comes as the major question. But there shouldn't be a need to come up with all these irrelevant arguments to sugar coat or cover it up.

Majority of the successful people I know of are self taught, even those who went to elite universities. Let me put forward a subjective note: I think we all need to understand these 3 aspects in terms of what they actually provide:

1. University / Schools / Any Learning Place: An infrastructure where people from various walks of life can get to know each other and learn through the experience of collaborating. This should of course be Paid, or sponsored.
2. Teachers' Time: People who spend their time in nudging the learners in the right direction, and in the process learn how to do this better. This should also be Paid for.
3. Knowledge Base: The actual information which everyone learns. This must be Free.

Even though 'creation of knowledge base' also includes time spent by people, eventually if the information is kept behind paywalls or decorated in a library which can be burnt leaving behind a whole population bragging "we used to have a lot of knowledge in Nalanda", that could be counter productive to the learning system.

The finances of keeping the Knowledge Base free can be obtained from point 1 and 2 and even by additional no-strings-attached-sponsorships. The no-strings-attached is key to avoid the knowledge base getting tampered with propaganda because of the pressure from sponsors, just like we see happening with the Indian history since 2014.

Now coming to the concern you might have: "people won't learn if the knowledge base is free." – This is a biased concern. As an example, we all have seen at least one person cooking in the kitchen. We mostly know the process. But do we all like to cook, even for ourselves? No. Maybe some of us tried and then concluded with a "no". That's what free knowledge base does. It allows EVERYONE to try EVERYTHING and many of them will give up half way through. But in this process, someone who really wants to cook will eventually do so. And that's the whole point. We need more of 'someones' to find their 'somethings' they are passionate about and that can only happen if everyone gets to try everything without worrying about paying for it. Opportunity of self learning must be a citizen's fundamental right. Anyone adding a paywall to information must be considered as some trying establish control and monopoly.

This philosophy is similar to the approach of "innocent unless proven guilty" that majority of decent societies follow. We prioritise protecting the innocent more than punishing the guilty because an innocent life in jail is far worse.

All this might seem utopian, but it is already happening in various areas of the world, for years. There are governments that provide free education to students and there are other ways to support such a system. Lack of finance is an excuse for limited access to information and we really must start thinking beyond this.

Digital formats have made it far more easier and cost effective to support this system. It's time we start working towards it.