Education in the US

MIT has it's OpenCourseWare program. Except for a few courses on video ( Linear Algebra and Differential Equations ) the entire ' openness ' is nothing more than publishing the syllabi and some handwritten lecture notes of students. - What a hoax. What is the big deal?

Today, I watched the first videolecture of Harvard's E-222 course on Abstract Algebra. The lectures are about the book Algebra by M. Artin. ( Well known to me, I self-studied it in 2007 ). Anyway Benedict Gross, the lecturer, was talking about other Harvard courses in numbers. I tried to look up the topics of these courses and then I found out that a login is required for that.

That's it! There is secrecy about the actual content of the mathematics programmes of the various universities. That is called capitalism. Competition among universities. It is also a way to hoax-up the so-called 'quality' of the educational material. They are asking ludicrous fees for reading out loud Artin's books. It's a system to introduce classes in society.

Everyone who read Ramanujan's life story probably agrees with me that Mathematics should be free and accessible to everyone on the planet wether studying in Cambridge, through the Open University or at home self-studying a copy of Artin's book downloaded from internet.

What I like about the US is, that it is home of Mathematica -AND- Sage, of Bush/Obama -AND- Ron Paul, and a zillion other contradictions.