Tag: education

Recommended Resources on Unschooling

  • Peter Gray’s posts at Psychology Today
  • Gray’s book, Free to Learn
  • Zak Slayback’s blog
  • Ivan Illich, Deschooling Society  – Despite some anti-progress and anti-market silliness, Illich diagnoses many of the problems with school powerfully
  • John Taylor Gatto – Any of his books will give you food for thought.  Dumbing us Down might be an easy place to start
  • John Holt – Again, any of his books.  Teach Your Own is a good compilation of many of his best work and ideas
  • Sudbury Valley School – Several books on this unique unschool school, all worth reading.  Free at Last is a nice short collection of stories at the school
  • School Sucks Podcast
  • Blake Boles – Blake blogs, podcasts, and runs a company devoted to young self-directed learners
  • Jeff Till’s Five Hundred Years – A comprehensive case for home education is excellent, in both audio and PDF format
  • The Praxis Blog – for self-directed learners working to build a career

This is scratching the surface.  Google any of the above names to find more of their work, as well as the countless other thinkers and doers and parents and kids who are breaking the mold and living and learning on their own terms.

Episode 17: What it’s Like to Be an Unschooled 10 Year Old, with NL Morehouse

My 10 year old son told me he wanted to come on the podcast to talk about being unschooled.  He thought maybe kids or parents who were unsure might enjoy hearing from someone who’s in the process.

We discuss how we came to unschool, what a typical day is like, and his plans for the future.

This and all episodes are available on SoundCloud, iTunes, and Stitcher.

*Oh, if you want to see how NL has changed over the last few years, check out our interview when he was nine, as well as when he was eight.

Playing with Legos is More Valuable than Learning Algebra

Playing with Legos is More Valuable Than Learning Algebra

I was homeschooled.  My mom really wanted to have a highly structured and rigorous curriculum for us.  She didn’t.  She tried – lord knows the number of books she purchased at annual curriculum fairs – and we’d go through phases with a little more structure than others.  But ultimately, she was raising three stubborn kids while also caring for a disabled husband (and just about anyone else we ever met who needed help…my mom is a wonderful woman who has a terrible time saying ‘no’).

The result is that my siblings and I didn’t do much consistent, structured learning.  Today we might be called borderline “unschoolers”, but at the time nobody had heard the word.  The most structure we had was in the daily and weekly chores we did to help keep up the house and yard and the fact that all three of us had paying jobs from age 10 or so on.  (One of the benefits of not being in school all day is that you can work and earn money, though laws make this harder and harder.)

So what did we do?  I would estimate that between the ages of 4 and 13, roughly half of my time any given day was spent playing with Legos.  My mom used to feel guilty about this.  Frankly, so did I.  I was always a little worried that “real school kids” would be far ahead of me in their knowledge and skill and it might embarrass me some day.  But that day never came.  Real school kids suffered all day while I played Legos, and by the time I went to school (one year in high school, and then college, neither of which were worth the cost) they were no better for it.

My mom would sometime assign us math work through a textbook (Saxon Math. Even the name is ominous), which we would complete and grade on our own.  I remember sitting at my desk and moving through “Algebra 1/2” as fast as I could, not caring or comprehending it.  I’d grade it with the answer guide and fix errors, but mostly I was staring out the window at the excessively fat Squirrels of Milwood, who I’m pretty sure were running some kind of animal cartel.  The fattest of them was an albino squirrel who was probably immortal.  I called him The Godsquirrel.  Where was I…oh yes, working on math problems…

That was pretty much how it would go.  I’d get it out of the way (or not) and get back to my Legos.  Only later have I come to realize how much more valuable playing with Legos was than the little math I did, or really any of the formal instruction I had.  I remember nearly every Lego creation in detail and with great pride.  In fact, give me some Legos today I can still whip up a mean spaceship or watercraft if I do say so myself.

There are a few reasons I think playing with Legos was much more valuable to me than pretending to learn from textbooks.

Confidence

Confidence cannot be given.  It must be earned.  No cat poster telling you that you can do anything will really give you the self-esteem needed to pursue your goals with grit and determination.  Confidence comes by overcoming challenges and solving problems.  Especially problems that are meaningful to you.  Building entire cities with plastic blocks is time-consuming and can be very challenging.  When you’re done you get so much more than a gold star or a pat on the head or a lifeless word on a page that says, “Correct”.  You get to see and touch and play with a tangible creation.  Until you decide to destroy it, you have proof of your work and the challenges you overcame.  (It’s doubly challenging when you have to dig through the Lego bin piece by piece so as not to be too loud and awaken your mom, who is probably on the phone helping someone downstairs, to the realization that you’re playing instead of working.)

Value Creation

In school you’re rewarded for finding the right answers to questions you don’t care about.  Neither does anyone else except (maybe) your teacher.  In the market place where you’ll spend most of your life working and interacting, no one cares about whether you’re right on some arbitrary scale.  They care about value creation.  Playing with Legos imparts this lesson.  No kid gives two hoots about the method you use for finding and snapping together pieces.  What matters is the beauty, originality, and functionality of the end result.  Did you make something awesome?  Everything else is negotiable and can be experimented with, but the ultimate test is whether you created something valuable to yourself and others.  Not in theory, but in the real world.  That’s a kind of “show your work” I can get behind.

Solve for X

Algebra is about figuring out puzzles when you don’t have all the pieces.  But most kids don’t really know this and don’t really care.  I didn’t.  But I did love solving complex problems without having all the pieces…as long as those pieces were small bits of colored plastic.  None of us had enough Legos to build exactly what we envisioned in all the right colors and shapes.  Especially back then when there were few custom pieces or crazy shapes. (*Shakes cane at kids these days*)  You want to make a light saber?  You’ve got to break some other pieces in half and improvise.  Lego building is nothing but a series of complex design problems with a constant absence of the right pieces.  I loved solving for X, as long as it was the X-Wing spacecraft.

Freedom

New sets come with instructions.  Maybe you follow them once, maybe not at all.  But eventually you’ll rip apart the prescribed design and create something new.  There are no arbitrary rules, but it doesn’t mean there are no rules.  Like the real world, some things are non-negotiable.  The pieces have definite physical dimensions.  You can break or color (or melt!) them sometimes, but only to a limited extent.  You learn to work with the very few natural rules, but that with those you can create anything you want.  A building that turns into an airplane that drops a bomb that’s really a submarine?  No problem.  The only limiting factors are your resources (of which you can acquire more if you save up your paper route money) and your imagination and skill.  Learning to achieve goals when no one has assigned goals to you or methods for reaching them is the hardest thing for a schooled mind.  It’s also the most valuable.

Change

Lego builds are not permanent.  Siblings, friends, and mostly your own boredom drive you to tear down and recreate constantly.  It’s an open-ended system.  There is no once for all plateau or achievement.  There is no Lego graduation.  It’s a dynamic, non-linear world of possibility.  Whatever you have built can and probably will be changed into something better.  You’re never done.  That mindset is powerful, and a strong shield against dangerous status quo bias and constructivist notions of the individual and society.

This is all playful (all the best things are) and anecdotal.  If you want some deeper stuff about why playing with Legos or any other self-chosen activity is superior to textbooks and schools and teacher guided learning, check out the excellent work of Dr. Peter Gray.

Oh, and thanks mom.  You never had it in you to be an authoritarian task-master, and that’s opened up the world to me.

————

*Update: Some readers seem to have a difficult time getting the general point because of the specific title.  The point of this post isn’t that always and everywhere for everyone Lego play is more valuable than algebra.  The point is that kids doing and learning things of their own choosing in their own way on their own time is more valuable than making them do stuff.  Most kids will prefer Legos to math.  Let them play Legos.  Some may prefer math to Legos.  Let them do math.

*Update 2: I just confirmed from a current Milwood resident that the Godsquirrel still exists. I knew he was immortal!  The source understandably wishes to remain anonymous. Squirrel mafias are nuts, and you never know what they might do.

*Update 3: Yes, I know. Technically they are called LEGO, and the plural of LEGO is LEGO. All caps. No “s”. I chose to write it as “Legos” because that’s what I played with darnit! As kids we said, “Let’s play (with) Legos”. And we did. I wrote this about my experience, and it would’ve seemed weird to me if you told me I was playing with LEGO. Sorry grammar and branding purists, this is my story…it’s all I have…can you let me have it?! (I mostly skipped English lessons in favor of the little plastic blocks as well. Blame LEGO.)

*If you like the topic, check out this post on why education should look more like bike riding, and browse through some of the other posts on education here.

*YOU MIGHT ALSO LIKE:

Why Mario Maker is better than a marketing major

How my son learned to read when we stopped trying to teach him

Want to Make Better Decisions? Get Some Skin in the Game

If you follow sports you’ll notice something.  Vegas is better than the experts at predicting outcomes.  You could chalk this up to the wisdom of crowds, but this can’t be the only explanation, because in surveys and polls the crowd doesn’t do very well compared to Vegas either.

The reason Vegas is better on average than individual experts or surveyed masses is because people choose better when they have skin in the game.  It’s one of the reasons democracy is a bad way to determine the policies people want and grocery stores don’t survey their customers to decide how to stock their shelves.  When it’s free, people take different and dumber risks.

This is why my colleague and co-author Zak Slayback wrote recently that you should burn your backup plan.  It’s why some people get neck tattoos.  It’s why Bruce Wayne had to climb without the rope.

Even worse than having no skin in the game is having the opposite.  A cushion large enough to not only catch you if you try and fall, but one that can sustain you even if you don’t try at all.  Economists call this the moral hazard in the world of financial regulation.  When third parties insure against risk, people and institutions make worse decisions.  Think high risk home loans underwritten by banks who knew that taxpayers would be forced to bail them out if it went south.  It applies on the personal level too.  While it’s easy to call inheritors of wealth financially privileged, I think it’s often harder to discover and live a fulfilling life if you’ve got a huge trust fund.  If you don’t have to win, it’s hard to get the motivation to try.

All these examples might be too easy to agree with me on.  Let’s push a little farther.  I think college funds cause the same problem.  When parents put tens of thousands into an account that can only be used for college, young people will fall prey to the sunk cost fallacy and favor going to college much more than they would without that restricted money.  Once they do, they’ll take it less seriously.  As long as parents are satisfied with grades and activities, it doesn’t really matter.  The degree is perceived as free.  The opportunity cost is overlooked.  The diploma at the end is supposed to guarantee a job and an income, and these are supposed to pave the way to find fulfillment.  Plus, if you pick a major that is supposed to give you lots of career options, you get lulled into thinking you have infinite fallback plans.  Sure, you sat in classrooms or goofed around for the first 22 years of your life, but it’s all good. You’ve got that free degree so no matter what you do, you’re set.

Parents see college as an insurance plan against all problems.  They tend not to care much if you’re happy there or finding your groove or learning how the world works, as long as you get a degree.  Tell them you’re bored and restless and opting out to go start a business or pursue a career as an artist and risk giving them a coronary.  They feel more comfortable with you half-assing it through a moral hazard backed mediocrity.

Forget all that.  It’s your life.  Whatever you do, have skin in the game.  If you don’t or can’t in reality, imagine and live as if you did (a poor substitute, but better than nothing).  Find out the actual cost of your education.  Tally up how much of what kind of work it would take to pay for it yourself.  If it was all on you, would you pay and do it?  If not, why are you doing it now?  (Try the same with things like health care if you want a good shock and some insight into why the health care system is so screwed up.)  What are you willing to give up to get the things you want?  If what you think you’ll gain is less than what you’re willing to part with, why do it?

Are you willing to fail?  Are you so passionate about what you’re trying to do that you’ve got to try it out even if it doesn’t work?  What if the degree fails to bring you anything you want.  Will it have been worth it?  If not, why do it?  “Well, I’ve only got another two years, so I might as well have it under my belt.”  Really?  Compared to what?

If you are like most people and you don’t have any single passion or pursuit to throw yourself behind, no worries.  Go the opposite route.  Try a bunch of stuff and build a list of things you know you don’t love doing and want to avoid.  Avoid them.  Don’t do them because they’re low-risk or paid for by someone else.  That’s like the person who spends money they don’t have on clothes they don’t need because they were on sale.  A $100 pair of useless jeans marked down to $50 is not a savings, it’s a waste of $50.  Keep eliminating things that don’t bring you value and everything else is fair game.

I’m not saying it’s never a good idea to take something that someone is offering to pay for.  The point is to not overvalue the “free” part and undervalue the unseen costs.  Not only are there often strings and expectations and the cost of forgone opportunities, often valuable things offered for free aren’t even enjoyable or meaningful to you.  Don’t do them just because other people would call you crazy not to.  And don’t forget one of the biggest dangers of something someone else is paying for, which is the way it reduces your incentive to take it seriously and get the most out of it.

Look at the actions and activities in your life.  Do you have skin in the game?  The bigger and more important they are, the more you want to have skin in the game.  It’ll make you better and more likely to succeed in every way.

This is not an admonition to simply take more and bigger risks, or to alter your risk tolerance.  It’s an admonition to dig down deep and get to know yourself.  Discover your real risk tolerance.  Be honest about what you find, whether it’s more or less than you wish it was.  Make decisions for you, based on your unique assessment of the trade-offs involved.  Don’t suffer through things because, relative to everyone else’s opinion, they are low risk or a good deal or a safe backup plan.  Get some skin in the game.  The games you want to play.  On your terms.

The Funny Thing About Common Sense

There are lots of funny things in prevailing narratives. Here’s one:

“If you can’t get hired, go work for free until you are worth being paid” = crazy

“If you can’t get hired, borrow $50,000 dollars and spend four years not working and hope it makes you worth being paid” = sound advice

If we placed an equal burden proof on the status quo as we do on alternatives to it, decisions might look a lot different.

Who is College for?

Slightly modified from the original publication on Thought Catalog.

It is commonly assumed that everyone who can should go to college. Sure, maybe a few super-brilliant techies or people with a crystal clear path can skip it and do well, but everyone else needs to go, just to be safe. This is completely backwards. Most people can do a lot better than college. There are really only a few groups for whom college is the best option.

The legally-bound
Sadly, a number of professions have lobbied to secure barriers to entry in order to keep out plucky young upstarts who might undercut monopoly pricing. If you know beyond a shadow of a doubt you want to work in one of these professions, you’ll need to get the magic paper. Just be careful not to let the paper do all the work. For the sake of your customers, try to get more than just the legally required credential. The most common jobs with degree requirements are lawyers, doctors, and CPAs. If that’s you, bite the bullet.

The well-to-do, insecure partier
College is a consumption good for some people. It’s a four (or five or six) year party covered by mom and dad. If you’ve got stacks of cash and your major goal for your early twenties is to chill at frat houses with a Solo cup, maybe you should go to college. Let me take that back. You see, you can move to a college town and party without enrolling. But if you’re really insecure and worried about not having official student status at parties, you’ll need to pay the piper. Tuition and sitting through classes are a small price for a well-off party junkie who can’t think of non-credentialing methods of having a good time. Go for it!

The parental pleaser
A lot of parents will be mad at you and ashamed to talk about you to their friends if you’re not in college. Luckily, most parents don’t care too much if you’re actually getting value out of the experience, as long as you’re enrolled and passing. If keeping mom and dad reasonably happy without challenging them to rethink what happiness means to you is your top priority, go to college. There’s nothing else with the same mystical power to elicit parental pride.

The college professor
If your dream is to be a professor, you’ve got to do your time. In fact, the entire education system top to bottom is optimized for the creation of professors. Every other profession to emerge from 20+ years of institutional education requires a deschooling process, because only academia plays by the same rules and incentives as the school system. All other industries are remarkably different, what with their accountability to customers and emphasis on value creation. If the system is your first love, and doing research and teaching within its walls your sole dream, do it. You can be an intellectual without a degree, but not a university-sanctioned professor.

The bureaucrat
Government isn’t known for rewarding merit, but it’s great at rewarding rule-following and form-filing. If you dream of reviewing building permits or vehicle registration documents, you’ll need a degree of some kind. The nice thing in this field is that the things you’ll do in school are pretty similar to what you’ll do at work. Comply and complain about the non-compliant. As an added perk, you really can’t be fired for being rude to everyone once you’re in.

The frightened 9-5er
If security sits atop your personal hierarchy of needs, and working for a big corporation with a massive HR department that specializes in sameness and risk-avoidance sounds like the life you’ve been waiting for, go to college. It’s changing, and a little faster than you’d probably like, but most big companies still filter out non-degreed applicants for entry level jobs that require a heavy dose of repetitive process-oriented labor. You’ll be competing with machines and software, but for the time being, there’s still a slot for you.

Everyone else
If you don’t fit into one of these categories, college may still provide some value, but it should in no way be considered the default option. There are myriad ways to tailor your own learning experience or gain skills, knowledge, and a network to discover and do what makes you come alive. College should be treated as one option among many, and no more or less valuable or open to scrutiny and cost-benefit analysis.

Episode 11: “I Dropped Out of an Elite University and I Couldn’t Be Happier”

Zak Slayback was on scholarship at an Ivy League school.

Derek Magill was on the Dean’s list at a top tier university.

They both dropped out, and they’re both glad they did.  Zak and Derek join me to discuss their experiences and offer thoughts on the university system and what dissatisfied students can do.

This and all episodes are available on SoundCloud, iTunes, and Stitcher.

Three Unpopular Beliefs

I have a number of beliefs that are outside the mainstream.  Probably the three most controversial are listed below.  These beliefs were hard to arrive at.  None of them came naturally or intuitively, and all of them are a fairly significant departure from what I once believed.  In many ways it would be easier if I did not believe these things.  Still, these three unpopular beliefs play defining roles in what I do, and how and why I do it.

  1. The deliberate instruction of children is a net-negative. (Unless they seek and choose it themselves.)
  2. Government is unnecessary.
  3. Efforts to improve your own life do more good for the world than efforts to do good for the world.

5 Signs You Might Be Too Good for College

From the Praxis blog.

There is a common myth that only Steve Jobs-like geniuses and cheese puff eating flunkies should opt out of college.  For college to be a poor fit, you’ve either gotta be sitting on the next billion dollar startup idea or sitting on your mom’s couch.  This is nonsense.  There is a large and growing group of smart, hard-working young people who are way too good for the rigmarole and time-wasting conformity of even elite colleges.  I’ve met lots of them.

These are what I call “blue collar entrepreneurs”.  They’re quick, curious, eager, and in-touch with their core values and goals.  They want to learn about themselves and the world and won’t wait for permission.  These are the people for whom college is the biggest waste.

The mediocre, the minimum acceptable regurgitators, and the mildly enthusiastic are those who get the most value from college.  After all, their degree signals that they are about as good as all the other degree holders; average.  But the most ambitious young people gain little from such a signal.  In fact, a degree that lumps them in with all other degree holders undersells them.  They’re too good for college, and they have the power to send a much more valuable signal outside of the one-size-fits-all system.  They can create a better credential than the off-the-shelf version that takes four years and six figures.

“There’s no question that increased formal credentials can give you an advantage. The question is, is it the best advantage you can buy with the amount of money and time you’re going to spend?” –Michael Ellsberg

How to know if you’re too good for college?  Here are five signs to look for…

1) Your classmates frighten you.

You look around the classroom and it dawns on you: these people will walk out of here with the same credential as you.  All this time and money just to buy a degree that says, “Hey, I’m at least as good as the snoring sleeper next to me in Psych 101″.  Not only that, but your future accountant, doctor, marketing director, or editor might be sitting in that classroom.  You read the essay they turned in last week.  It wasn’t pretty.  If it’s clear this education isn’t preparing them for the world and the thought of them living and working as adults gives you a start, you might consider separating yourself from the crowd.

2) You feel a little annoyed being treated like a burden instead of a customer.

You might begin to feel most of your professors don’t see you as a customer, but a hindrance they’d like to get out of the way with minimal interaction and deviation.  Sure, there are always some good profs, but how many of them act annoyed at a teaching load of a few classes per semester, or give minimal and inconvenient office hours, or don’t seem to care if their lectures are boring, or get angry when you challenge their ideology or assumptions, or shame students on Facebook for asking questions about the syllabus?  You’re the customer and are right to wish to be treated as such.  You can always take your business and walk.

3) You learned more about how government functions from watching ‘The Wire’ than an entire year of political science classes.

The cat’s out of the bag.  Pandora’s box is open.  Whatever metaphor you use, the university is not the font of wisdom it once was.  Books have always been there for the curious, but with online courses, podcasts, audiobooks, eBooks, streaming videos, and social networks, you might find yourself eagerly consuming information relevant to you everywhere but the classroom.  The learning method at universities is older than the wheel, and it’s a crap-shoot whether you’ll get a decent teacher.  If you get your learn on outside of the graded conveyor belt already, why keep taxing yourself with class?

4) Your degree is the least impressive part of your resume.

If you’ve already done a lot of things, or you’re capable of doing a lot of things, that are rarer and more interesting than getting a BA, why get one?  If you’ve started a business, worked for a year or longer at a good company, traveled the world on your own steam and your own dime, built a website, written some articles, sold products, learned a foreign or programming language, or any number of interesting things, those will be more valuable on your resume and in building your network and reputation than a generic degree.  Ask yourself what you’d want an employee to bring to the table if you owned a business.  Can you get those things right now, without school?

5) You’re happy when class is cancelled.

What an odd thing that students pay up front for a university education and then get excited when the service is not provided.  What other product is treated this way?  If classes are a distraction from running student clubs or newspapers, working, blogging, hobbies, startups, or other things that make you come alive, why not get it out of the way?  The idea of a degree as a fallback is pretty weak.  It’s not going to magically lift you out of poverty or aimlessness.  You’ve got to do that yourself.  Why not start now with all your energy and not have nagging classes and exams hanging over your head?

If you see yourself in these signs, you might be too good for college.  Jump off the conveyor belt and create your own path.  Fortune favors the bold, so break free.

If you know you’re worth more than college but you’re not quite sure how to plot your own path and discover what makes you come alive, we can help.  That’s what Praxis was created for. Contact us or Apply today!

The Biggest Problems are the Biggest Opportunities

In their book Bold: How to Go Big, Achieve Success, and Impact the World, Peter Diamandis and Steven Kotler talk about the fact that the biggest problems in the world are also the biggest opportunities.  Higher education is no exception.

We are by now well acquainted with the myriad problems with the traditional higher ed conveyor belt system.  Student debt is reaching astronomical levels, institutions have become little more than degree mills spitting out graduates unequipped for the world, students are bored and restless, employers aren’t finding skilled workers, and nobody’s happy.  This is a big problem, and therefore a big opportunity.

It’s not only an opportunity for entrepreneurs to create new education models like Praxis, Minerva, Gap-Year, Enstitute, and others; it’s also an opportunity for you as an individual.  You can capitalize on the problem by creating your own path.  The degree is declining in value and the classroom is fast becoming one of the weakest ways to gain relevant information, skill, confidence, network, and knowledge.  This is an opportunity for you to gain a first-mover advantage and step out of the classroom and into the world.

Those who can boldly say, “I opted-out of the stagnant status quo to create my own path”, and demonstrate the value they can produce will have a tremendous advantage over the throngs of young people hoping that BA on their resume will get them an interview.

Praxis is Democratizing the Degree

Above all a college degree is a signal.  People buy one to signal to the world – their parents, peers, employers, investors, co-workers – that they are a valuable, smart, skilled person worth working with.  Yet the signalling power of the degree has been dropping fast.  Ask any employer and they’ll tell you they have less and less trust in a degree to accurately signal a high-performing, value-creating person.  They prefer experience and demonstrated proof of knowledge, but instead they are asked to simply trust a credential that’s supposed to verify knowledge and skill they can’t see for themselves.  The whole system is based on trust, which is why it’s so vulnerable and ripe for innovation.

Why is Bitcoin a breakthrough? Because unlike all other methods of payment, it’s a trustless system. You don’t need to simply believe people and institutions, you can have demonstrated proof. It’s s platform for open, peer-to-peer verification.

That’s what we’re doing for credentialing at Praxis. The closed door, black box model asks everyone to trust universities and professors to accurately reflect knowledge and skill through tests, grades, and degrees, yet no one gets to actually see the process.  We’re opening it up to the world.  It doesn’t matter what your professor or institution thinks, it matters what the people who actually want to work with you think.  Let’s let them in.  Let’s let them give the grades.  Let’s decentralize this thing.

We’re not trying to create new and better credential gatekeepers. We’re tearing off the gates.  I describe what we’re doing and why in a bit more detail below.

You can also read and watch more about what we’re doing here.

The Problem of School

The great problem of school is that it’s a constant search and effort to teach children all the things they’d learn naturally if they were not in school.  School removes children from the world – the natural learning environment – hence kids don’t pick up the skills and knowledge they need and want. Schools then struggle and attempt all manner of convoluted methods to replace the knowledge they prevent kids from acquiring.

None of these methods work as well as freedom. Remove kids from schools and the purported purpose of schools – educated children – will be realized.

Of course, it will be realized in great abundance, depth, and diversity. This flowering of individual plans and ideas is messy and threatening to moral busybodies and power hungry social planners. It prevents mass control and threatens the status quo with wild beauty and innovation. Liberty upsets patterns. That is precisely why it is so important.

The Real Education Podcast with Blake Boles

Can you combine liberal arts and work experience?  Can you combine virtual and real-world?  That’s what Praxis is all about and what I discuss with Blake Boles on this episode of his Real Education Podcast.

Blake is an author and pioneer in the world of self-directed learning.  He’s got his hand in numerous projects and programs and his podcast is one of my new favorites.  Give a listen to the episode, and check out Blake’s stuff at his website.

The Problem of Forced Association

There’s a lot of ruckus over laws that either require or don’t require businesses and individuals to interact with each other.  Most of the discussion is focused on the identity of various parties in favor or opposed to the laws – gay couples, Christians opposed to gay marriage, liberal or conservative activists, etc.  It’s an ugly debate to watch.  Everyone is battling for control over the laws that determine who should associate with whom and under what conditions.  The real problem is not which people like and dislike which other people.  The real problem is the acceptance of forced association as a concept.

Forced association is any kind of social, civil, or commercial interaction that is hemmed in by force rather than choice.  It demands inclusion and exclusion based on rules passed down from authorities, rather than the free interplay of autonomous individuals.  Immigration restrictions are a form of forced association (in this case dis-association).  So are most anti-discrimination laws.  The idea that your social network must be determined for you is destructive of genuine community, and breeds hatred.  Everyone is left fighting over the rules and calling names instead of simply choosing to interact or not interact with whomever they wish.  How do you manage your Facebook friends?  Imagine if there were laws dictating certain people you were not allowed to friend, or certain pages you had to follow, or that you must treat all friend requests equally no matter who they came from?  A terrible recipe for genuine and meaningful interaction, friendship, and exchange of ideas.

Yet in society at large nobody seems to question forced association.  And why should they?  After all, most people have been conditioned since age 5 to accept a social scene tightly dictated by authority figures, not chosen by themselves.  School is forced association.  You must be with people the same age and zip code all day every day.  You can’t freely wander the halls and pop in and out of classes.  You can’t shop for teachers or friends or mentors across the entire community.  You get your cinder block cell with your pre-assigned seat and social group.  Better hope you find someone to get along with.

Bullying is a phenomenon borne almost entirely out of age-restricted groupings.  The response is never to allow kids to exit the cohort, or class, or school district, or school altogether.  That would work.  But it would mean free association.  Free association is too dangerous.  What if kids don’t become the widgets we want to fashion them into?  Instead efforts to stop bullying are just like the absurd efforts to curb rudeness in society with laws of forced association.  It’s a battle over who gets to define the bully, the victim, the reporting process, the burden of proof, the new rules, the banned items and words, the sensitivity training, the punishments, and who gets to be the ruler of the forced association.

Forced association is ugly, inhumane, and barbaric in all its forms.  As long as people are raised in environments of forced association it should come as no surprise that when they encounter a jerk they immediately begin a debate over what rules should force the jerk to behave differently and why.  Debates over who the real victim is erupt.  Some side with the jerk, some side with the others.  Crowdfunding campaigns and public debates and interviews and one-upsmanship and absurd hypothetical and real court cases emerge.  The whole spectacle is dirty, rude, vicious, and pernicious.

No one needs to make rules for who can or must associate with whom and in what way.  Free association can and will do a better job of sorting out all the conflicting beliefs and behaviors of members of society than any plan or rule.  Break from the mentality you’ve been raised with.  Apply the mentality you use on Facebook.  Forced association is never the answer.