

a Socratic education only works if you already inclined towards skeptical inquiry
Or if you just accost people in the streets like Socrates :b
I work at a top university and can confirm that the overwhelming majority of students are concerned primarily about jobs. It doesn’t matter how good the school is; this is an effect of industrialization and more importantly education being reduced to a means for economic development and productivity. In my experience, it is ironically worse at the “better” schools where acceptance is highly competitive. If I’m being honest, a good community college is the sweet spot: teachers invested in teaching and students with the leisure and/or low risk/investment in just learning things for the heck of it.

Unfortunately, depending on the jetstream, we still get a lot of their pollution blowing over here to Korea. I think it is mostly from coal power plants on the coast. Anecdotally, the effect of EVs on the air there does feel like it has lessened the amount of smog that blows over to Korea, in the spring especially. Glad to hear they are making progress. Last time I was in Beijing the air was unbearably smoky (2011).