Where else are you going to be free from business and product pressures and get sustained periods of solitude or collaboration? In the industry where every decision lasts until the quarter ends and everyone is beholden to making metrics go up and to the right?
Tell me what exactly are you going to learn by being under business pressures and goal posts.
You have a couple of assumptions baked into your world view that may not be valid. The most obvious being that people need "sustained periods of solitude and collaboration" to truly learn. I don't know if that assumption is warranted, it seems there are a number of people who learn quite a bit without those things. I could be persuaded to agree that you might maximize the rate at which you learn with those conditions however.
Learning is a lot like exercise in that regard (not surprisingly for similar physiological reasons). Just as walking to and from your cubical to the bus is "exercise", and you do derive a cardie-vascular benefit from it, deconstructing a broken application deployment process and recreating it without the obvious defects is "learning."
Those are not assumptions. Historical precedent is on my side and there is no shortage of examples: Feynman, Einstein, Grothendieck, Newton, Pierce, Hamming, Margaret Hamilton, Leslie Lamport, Barbara Liskov, Rich Hickey, and on and on. I think it would be foolish to argue that those individuals have not contributed in significant ways and they have all accomplished those contributions in academic and non-industrial settings. Rich Hickey even has a talk where he explicitly mentions the fact of needing long hours of solitude to think about things.
If "true learning" means making $9.25 an hour and slaving away 60 hours per week while a prof makes ~200k and takes all of the credit: I'd rather be ignorant.
