Drawing is a attempt to express many things, but its consistant quality is that it is just that: an attempt to express; a language act. Like all language acts, at its centre is the metaphor, the belief that an expression carrying general qualities with it (a drawing, a noun, a simile) can represent something we consider to have overlapping qualities (a body, an object, a topic), despite its additional irrelevant properties (inaccuracies, individualities, differences). While in life drawing we might hope to tie our style to any amount of heritage or graphic novelty, the constant is that in some way the drawing has at least some of the properties of the body.
Just as early modern academics attempted to discover 'the language of Adam', which represented the world exactly without extraneous erronious qualities, the 'academic' school of drawing popular in the 17th and 18th centuries represents an attempt to explore the most essential elements of the life drawing process through the shedding of inaccurate properties; not the desire for photorealism, which is the search for what is essential in a photograph, but an exploration of all that is human with the highest accuracy: the form, the inner life's outer signs, the rounded human experience – that is, all that we recognise in others without access to their inner world; the topology at the foundation of society.
Just as the search for the perfect language was doomed, so too was the search for the perfect expression of the human through accuracy of form. We recognise now that our need to interact with the universal is not satisfied by looking for it in the singular in total accuracy, but in abstraction; an evocative, generalised, line is now better regarded than a hundred lines moving towards a singular accuracy. At best we now regard academic drawing as a solid training for abstraction. Nevertheless, in the same way as a deep and detailed understanding of the world in all its variance has a value beyond its standing as the foundation of a single appropriate word, so a deep and detailed understanding of human variance has a value of its own beyond training for the abstract. We may never perfect what we like to think of as the universality of the human condition through a sequence of singular individuals, but perhaps through understanding where people diverge from the general and abstract, we are actually capturing something more tolerant, compassionate, and, yes, human, than we suspect. For this reason, if no other, the skills of academic drawing, with their neverending opportunity for improvement, are worth preserving.