Questions on Academia

The School of Athens (1510-1511), Raphael

1. Can academics give a meaningful voice to those outside of their classrooms? 

2. Is there any distinctive power/political structure in school that I don't have to care in my everyday life? 

3. Are they really interested in what they say they're interested in or they teach, or are they just teaching the same thing over and over ad nauseam? 

4. If I happen to have kept the interest and, in fact, rather managed to enlarge its scope with a certain focus, what am I supposed to do with this? What's the best way to use this? Especially in the context that I currently have a sort of remotely related job which often feels like just crowd control, and that I already ditched two schools for PhD in favour of doggedly making a living, and that I dropped out of a ThD course in the second week of the first semester? 

5. So what's the best way to deal with intellectual restlessness/vanity when you don't have a proper outlet to stimulate it? 

6. Is there any way I can contribute to the world while using the kind of things I did/learned at school?

7. What are the good platforms to bridge the disjuncture between academic ideas and public life? Are the schools in Korea even trying?