The education you receive in school certainly needn't have any direct relevance to your later career-as the liberal arts advocates like to say, it's to help you become a well-rounded person. My literature teacher one told us: "The purpose of education is to learn as much as you can and then forget it, so that it finds its way into your subconscious and affects your thinking for the rest of your life."

As for why people might want to study folk music in an academic setting, well, there are those of us who seem to have a mental block about how one would go about living the life of the "open road", and people like me who actually do a better rendition of a song after they've studied it and its origins, so that they understand it better. It may, for some people, sterilize and formalize folk, but for others it's the only way they can learn it.