Does mandatory continual professional development/education really lead to lifelong learning?

I am a voracious reader and while most of that goes into fiction, a good chunk also goes into reading non fiction. In fact, my passion for finance is largely due to my vicariously living through various books and finance fiction novels of Stephen Fry etc. Having switched gears to commerce later than most people, one of the main reasons I could catch up was having read extensively, and therefore often knowing more than my peers. Even during the admission interviews for IIM Ahmedabad & IIM Bangalore, and beyond, I could impress the interviewers with my knowledge beyond 'bean counting'/'mere CA curriculum knowledge'. largely because I'd read multiple books, blogs, magazines, textbooks etc. Anyways, this post is not hagiographic so enough of my story and back to the topic! 

Be it the institute of chartered accountants, management accountants, chartered secretaries, CFAs, FRMs, doctors, actuaries and so on, every established profession imposes certain mandatory knowledge updation hours for their members. This is often more stringent for members in public practice, than for those in employment. Usually, self declarations are allowed and even the mode of fulfilling hours are flexible, with options available to professionals to achieve their target in the least possible monetary investment and time. However, i have the following issues with this process

1) Why impose different requirements for those in public practice and those in service? The competency requirements from both should not differ, and in fact those in service may be more 'specialized' and 'frogs in the well' than their counterparts in public practice. Hence, there is no rationale distinction for this, except that members in service often retain their membership with much cajoling, so making more requirements for them may drive more of them away from retaining their membership-and which organization does not need fee paying members? Members in practice have their bread and butter contingent on their profession bestowed certificate of practice, but those in service do not have those constraints. 

2) Process driven to ensure more attendance in institute organized seminars-Even though professional institute organized programs are inexpensive(around Rs 1000-2000 per day for ICAI/ICSI/ICWAI), professionals often do not want to devote an entire day to content they would rather read in a hour or two.

3) Inflexible enough to suit needs-Even though bodies do allow for 'unstructured professional development' in terms of crosswords, reading, peer group discussions; there is still a long way to go.  

4) Compliance driven process does not foster willing compliance-I have seen professionals send their interns/other employees to attend programs and fill attendance slips on their behalf. This is because 

5) Commercial interests often result in regulatory capture-When private sector is allowed to deliver programs with CPD credits as done in UK/USA etc, those private sector bodies have an incentive to lobby for more stringent CPD requirements for their programs/speciality. 

6) Little focus on organization sponsorship that ensures peer learning, networking and applying what you learn One reason why executive education programs are so popular, is their organization context, which helps executives to learn from their peers in other functions, while immediately applying their learnings on the job often in the timespan between sessions. This organization driven sponsorship is quite helpful, but often in a misconceived wish to subsidize individual members, organization sponsored fees are often higher than self sponsored one(the ICSI Mumbai scheme at CCRT being a notable exception which allows bulk corporate members) since they are felt to have deep pockets! Yet, this approach is short sighted. 

In this information overload era where we are plugged into the digital world of laptop-smartphone-TV-tablet, it is difficult to make time for self development amidst challenging careers. Indeed, mastering subjects one has not learnt at all formally earlier(imagine the plight of chartered accountants who learnt IFRS from scratch when it was introduced!) often takes much more time than say 40hrs/year, and devoting the bare minimum mandated time might give one the illusion of comfort, while actually one may be falling behind technically and technologically compared to the next few batch(es) of professionals educated under updated curriculums/delivery mechanisms. 

What should an university be like-lessons from John Henry Newman

The classics often have great lessons for today's situations, because they oft contain eternal truths uninfluenced by the mass media/indoctrination of today. After reading the book The Idea of a University Defined and Illustrated: In Nine Discourses Delivered to the Catholics of Dublin (http://www.gutenberg.org/files/24526/24526-h/24526-h.html),  I felt some of the ideas deserved a wider audience especially given the debate about how higher education should be/education bubble etc. I tried to do justice to the main ideas but given it was written in old English and digressed a lot on the Church-University relationship, it may not be 100% faithful to the old text. 

1. Teaching Focused:- University is a place of teaching universal knowledge. This implies that its object is diffusion and extension of knowledge rather than the advancement. If its object were scientific and philosophical discovery, I do not see why a University should have students..
2.  Separate research and teaching:-To discover and to teach are distinct functions; they are also distinct gifts, and are not commonly found united in the same person. He, too, who spends his day in dispensing his existing knowledge to all comers is unlikely to have either leisure or energy to acquire new. The common sense of mankind has associated the search after truth with seclusion and quiet. The greatest thinkers have been too intent on their subject to admit of interruption; they have been men of absent minds and idosyncratic habits, and have, more or less, shunned the lecture room and the public school. Examples given are Pythagoras, Thales, Plato ,Aristotle ,Friar Bacon,Newton etc. There were  great examples the other way, perhaps Socrates, certainly Lord Bacon; still I think it must be allowed on the whole that, while teaching involves external engagements, the natural home for experiment and speculation is retirement. 
3. The tendency for professional overeach/rent seeking Every professional man has rightly a zeal for his profession, and he would not do his duty towards it without that zeal. And that zeal soon becomes exclusive, or rather necessarily involves a sort of exclusiveness. A zealous professional man soon comes to think that his profession is all in all, and that the world would not go on without it. This collision, this desire on the part of every profession to be supreme,—this necessary, though reluctant, subordination of the one to the other,—is a process ever going on, ever acted out before our eyes. The civilian is in rivalry with the soldier, the soldier with the civilian. The diplomatist, the lawyer, the political economist, the merchant, each wishes to usurp the powers of the state, and to mould society upon the principles of his own pursuit.I remark, moreover, that these various usurpations are frequently made in perfectly good faith. There is no intention of encroachment on the part of the encroachers. 
4. The danger of  too much liberal arts education:-Nothing is more common in an age like this, when books abound, than to fancy that the gratification of a love of reading is real study. Some have a taste for reading, but in whom it is little more than the result of mental restlessness and curiosity. Such minds cannot fix their gaze on one object for two seconds together; the very impulse which leads them to read at all, leads them to read on, and never to stay or hang over any one idea. The pleasurable excitement of reading what is new is their motive principle; and the imagination that they are doing something, and the boyish vanity which accompanies it, are their reward. Such youths often profess to like poetry, or to like history or biography; they are fond of lectures on certain of the physical sciences; or they may possibly have a real and true taste for natural history or other cognate subjects;—and so far they may be regarded with satisfaction; but on the other hand they profess that they do not like logic, they do not like algebra, they have no taste for mathematics; which only means that they do not like application, they do not like attention, they shrink from the effort and lab-our of thinking, and the process of true intellectual gymnastics. The consequence will be that, when they grow up, they may, if it so happen, be agreeable in conversation, they may be well informed in this or that department of knowledge, they may be what is called literary; but they will have no consistency, steadiness, or perseverance; they will not be able to make a telling speech, or to write a good letter, or to fling in debate a smart antagonist, unless so far as, now and then, mother-wit supplies a sudden capacity, which cannot be ordinarily counted on. They cannot state an argument or a question, or take a clear survey of a whole transaction, or give sensible and appropriate advice under difficulties, or do any of those things which inspire confidence and gain influence, which raise a man in life, and make him useful to his religion or his country. 
5. Need to study theology:-When was the world without it? Have the systems of Atheism or Pantheism, as sciences, prevailed in the literature of nations, or received a formation or attained a completeness such as Monotheism? We find it in old Greece, and even in Rome, as well as in Judea and the East. We find it in popular literature, in philosophy, in poetry, as a positive and settled teaching, differing not at all in the appearance it presents, whether in Protestant England, or in schismatical Russia, or in the Mahometan populations, or in the Catholic Church. If ever there was a subject of thought, which had earned by prescription to be received among the studies of a University, and which could not be rejected except on the score of convicted imposture, as astrology or alchemy; if there be a science anywhere, which at least could claim not to be ignored, but to be entertained, and either distinctly accepted or  distinctly reprobated, or rather, which cannot be passed over in a scheme of universal instruction, without involving a positive denial of its truth, it is this ancient, this far-spreading philosophy.
6. The need for active reading/learning We must carefully distinguish,  between the mere diversion of the mind and its real education. Supposing, for instance, I am tempted to go into some society which will do me harm, and supposing, instead, I fall asleep in my chair, and so let the time pass by. The opportune sleep has but removed the temptation for this once. It has not made me better; for I have not been shielded from temptation by any act of my own, but I was passive under an accident, for such I may call sleep. And so in like manner, if I hear a lecture indolently and passively, I cannot indeed be elsewhere while I am here hearing it,—but it produces no positive effect on my mind,—it does not tend to create any power in my breast capable of resisting temptation by its own vigour, should temptation come a second time. A man may hear a thousand lectures, and read a thousand volumes, and be at the end of the process very much where he was, as regards knowledge. Something more than merely admitting it in a negative way into the mind is necessary, if it is to remain there. It must not be passively received, but actually and actively entered into, embraced, mastered. The mind must go half-way to meet what comes to it from without. You have come, not merely to be taught, but to learn. You have come to exert your minds. You have come to make what you hear your own, by putting out your hand, as it were, to grasp it and appropriate it.