Tag: school

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.

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.

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 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 Cure is Not the Cause

A friend worked at a company that instituted a no cell phone policy during meetings. Apparently too many people were on their phones instead of paying attention.

If you look at it from an authoritarian standpoint as an organizer, the cause for lack of engagement was cell phone use.  But put yourself in the shoes of an attendee and you see that cell phones were not the cause of the problem, but the cure for it. The problem was boredom. The cause was too many or too long or not interesting enough meetings.

We see cures blamed as causes everywhere. Schools routinely blame whatever form of escape, entertainment, distraction, or even real learning that kids conceive to cope with the rigid soul-sucking structure of the system. From a top-down, black-and-white rulers standpoint, the answer is always more bans and more rules.

What would happen instead if we assumed rationality and no malintent on the part of the cell phone users or students?  What might their behavior reveal about the system or process?  If you run a business you can get mad at customers who don’t do what you want all you like, but attacking or placing restrictions on them is not a long term strategy for success in a competitive market. You must try to understand why they aren’t doing what you want and adapt your offerings.

When people are looking for an escape don’t block the exit.  Instead try to learn why they want out in the first place.

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.

The Three Places to Get Drugs

I was listening to the Tim Ferriss Podcast yesterday where he interviewed James Fadiman about psychedelics.  Fadiman was talking about LSD and made an offhand remark that caught my ear.  He said LSD, like almost all other drugs, is very hard to get except in three places where it’s abundant.

Schools, universities, and prisons.

There is a lot to consider in this anecdote.  These three institutions have several things in common that distinguish them from others.  They are almost always funded at least in large part through tax dollars.  They are managed at least indirectly by governments, and subject to elected officials and un-elected bureaucrats in their day to day operations.  They are seen by most members of the public as absolute necessities in any civilized society.  Because they’re seen as necessary they get far less scrutiny than institutions seen as optional.

The vast majority of those in these institutions are not there by free and conscious choice.  It may seem extreme to claim this of universities, but if you spend time questioning college students you’ll find that most don’t really know why they’re there and haven’t ever considered another path.  They’re there because the cumulative force of parents, public opinion, and perceived career safety close off all other options.  Even if they have choice, they do not think they have choice.  They are not freely choosing to be there the way someone chooses to attend a baseball game or join a country club.

These institutions tend to place a higher priority on stopping drug use than other institutions in society, yet they get more of it.  Prison is the starkest example (although schools are not far off) with absolute borders and armed agents 24/7.  Still a drug trade cannot be suppressed.  Perhaps when all other forms of individuality and rebellion are suppressed, whatever subversive activity one can get away with will emerge.

There is something delicious about the irony of these institutions being the best sources for banned substances.  There is also something sad.  What it reveals about human nature is at least a little bit inspiring.  A refusal to fully submit, and a desire to find escape, even if only in the mind.  What it reveals about the institutions and society is at least a little depressing.

 

Things We Do To Our Children

I joined Albert Lu on The Economy Podcast to talk about things we do to our children.  We discussed whether and to what extent a parent can know what’s good for a child and force them to do things for their own good, from sports to music lessons and beyond.  We also discussed the lack of student-directed learning from grade school all the way through college and the problems it creates.

Listen to the episode here.  I’m on first and then author Richard Maybury on the same topic.

The Expedition of Our Age

unnamedNothing is guaranteed.  There is no plan or path that can ensure the kind of life you want.  There are only opportunities with varying degrees of risk.  And sometimes the least risky opportunities are also those least likely to result in fulfillment.  The great success stories are the result of daring expedition and pursuit of unique goals.

There was a time when a college education was something of an adventure.  It was exclusive, not easy to get, and signaled something special.  Leaving your home town for a university was a big deal, a great expedition.  This is no longer true.  Going to college is not difficult today.  It’s not elite or rare.  Most young people can easily travel and live away from their home towns and many have even before college.  Today, college isn’t much of an adventure.  In fact, it attracts some of the most risk averse individuals, and perhaps paradoxically the higher ranked the school often the more risk averse its students.

There is a small but growing number of young people who see this and they’ve got the itch.  They go to college only to realize it’s a warmed over version of all the years of safe, institutional schooling they’ve just completed.  No one will question their decision to go.  No one will call them crazy.  The risk of flunking out is as minuscule as the risk of standing out.  The sense of adventure is gone, replaced with a sense of perpetual adolescence and paternalistic planning.

Those with the itch for real adventure realize that no one is going to give it to them.  The prefabricated social life and conveyor-belt career track isn’t enough.  If they want to embark on a daring expedition, they’ll have to do it themselves.  The great secret is that it’s far easier than anyone imagines.  All the resources exist already within arms reach.  Anything in the world you want to learn or do, anyone you want to meet, any personal challenge you want to give yourself, any skill you want to devote yourself to: they’re all doable, without anyone’s permission.

The world is waiting.  It won’t be found on dorm room couches.  It won’t be found in cinder block classrooms.  It won’t be given to those who simply follow the rules and don’t upset the apple cart.  It will be discovered – it will be created – by those daring enough to seek adventure and live life on their own terms.

The geographical territory of the earth has been largely discovered.  But we’re only on the borderlands of human potential.  It lies before us vast, untamed, full of mystery and possibility.  It will be explored by those brave enough.  No special qualifications are needed beyond courage, self-honesty, a hunger for self-knowledge, and willingness to break the mold.

The great expedition of our age is the self-created journey; the self-directed life.

The Danger of Conflating Education with School

In the airport recently I saw this ad:

 

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I was struck and almost offended by it.  Not only does the idea of this autonomous individual being “gently nudged” sound a bit creepy and paternalistic, the ad implies that we should be happy for Hector.  Why?  It tells us nothing about what Hector loves or wants.  It tells us nothing about why Hector was running from school.  It tells us nothing about what Hector went on to do.  It simply states that he was, “pushed to reach his potential” and “succeed in school”.  But succeeding in school may not have anything to do with success in life for Hector.  No matter.  Well meaning teachers and parents will do, “whatever it takes” to get kids in school and keep them there.  They’ll cajole and pressure them to get passing grades on tests and in subjects that have almost no bearing on anything important to the kids.

We’re saturated with Orwellian doublespeak when it comes to school.  It’s gotten to the point where almost no one seems to remember that education exists apart from school.  Same goes for words like success and achievement.  School is used as a synonym.  A simple Google image search for the word education results in all the trappings of school.  But school is one of the narrowest, least effective means of education.

If we mean by education a tamed will and constrained imagination, school does a decent job.  If we mean the temporary memorization of a set of arbitrary facts chosen by arbitrary authority and the permanent crystallization of the life-as-a-conveyor-belt mindset, school does a decent job.  But then it’s more about obedience than education.  Education is about transformation.  It’s a process of transforming the way we see the world and giving us new conceptual tools to put on as lenses and improve our ability to navigate towards our goals.  Kids aren’t given much chance or scope to explore and decide what goals they want to pursue or how they want to do it.  They don’t even get responsibility over their own schedule.

All genuine learning is self-directed.  It happens only when the learner has the desire.  Obedience and hoop jumping can be generated by compulsion and deprivation, but transformative education requires freedom.  If Hector really wanted to be in school he wouldn’t need a nudge.  If he was there of his own volition because he wanted to learn what they were teaching then he might genuinely learn.

Hector was nudged and pushed into school by others.  Not a great way to become the creative force in his own life.  Most kids dislike school and would skip it if they could get away with it.  Before immediately attempting to get them back within the fences we might ask why they want to escape.  It’s not because kids simply won’t push themselves to do challenging things.  Watch them play.  They do it all the time.  It’s not that they won’t pour themselves into study and experimentation to improve knowledge and skill.  Watch them work to beat a video game.  They’re not running away from hard work or education.  They’re running away from school.  Maybe we should let them.

How to Keep the Young and Poor from Succeeding

Let’s face it. I’m not that young anymore. I’m also not poor anymore, and I live a comfortable middle-class American life. Most older, better-off middle-classers like me got where we are through the dynamic market process. The trouble is, now that we’re doing pretty well, that same dynamic process is a threat. I don’t want some young whippersnapper or poor immigrant to outwork me. What if they succeed faster than I do? What if they create more value than I can, and so outcompete me for a job?

Take heart, well-heeled middle-agers. I have a plan. My scheme for keeping younger and poorer people from succeeding—and possibly making us have to work harder to stay on top—is two-pronged: We’ve got to affect both supply and demand.

We need to restrict the supply of economic opportunities. We need to make those opportunities more costly and thus out of the reach of many young and poor. We also need to suppress the demand for jobs and entrepreneurial ventures. We need to make it more beneficial to stay out of the market than to participate in it.

Let’s get to some specifics.

Restrict the supply of opportunities

The biggest advantages young and poor people have over us are very low opportunity costs and a low-cost lifestyle. This means they don’t have to give up much to work a job, and they don’t need to earn much to cover their expenses. Because of these major advantages, they can work for very low wages, and thus become attractive for employers to hire and train. At low wages, they’ll always find work, and worse yet, they’ll be constantly learning and improving—adding to their stock of human capital.

The obvious solution is to make it illegal to work for low wages. Working for free is absolutely out of the question. If young and poor people could simply offer to work for little or no pay, they’d soon be gaining valuable skills and competing with us for jobs! Let’s cut that first rung off the ladder, lest they climb over us some day.

Young and inexperienced workers don’t have a lot of expertise. They make mistakes. Of course, if they’re allowed to participate in the trial-and-error process of the market, the incentives will soon drive them to develop expertise and be reliable suppliers of goods and services. That would be a travesty for us. We need to keep them unskilled and unreliable. The solution is to create a labyrinthine web of licenses and regulations that make it illegal for anyone but experts to sell goods or offer services. Since we’ve already banned working for low wages or apprenticing for free, it will be almost impossible for these novices to learn from a seasoned expert until they gain the necessary skill. We can make it even harder by adding lots of fees and costly training sessions to obtain licenses.

There needn’t be just one law making low wages illegal or just one licensing and regulatory regime. We need a wide variety of complex and ever-changing barriers. High taxes on productivity and profit, union dues and demands, work restrictions, rigid job categories, seniority bias, massive credential requirements, health and safety rules to cripple upstarts, consumer protection laws to hamper smaller producers, no access to capital or ability to stay in line with the law without costly lawyers and accountants, etc., etc., ad nauseam.

My recommendations are myriad, but they all boil down to a simple principle: Do anything we can to make economic opportunities more costly and rare. This reserves most of said opportunities for us.

Now for the second prong.

Reward non-participation

We don’t want to seem callous and cold toward those less comfortably situated. Indeed, we harbor no ill will toward the young and poor. We just don’t want them to compete with or catch us.

Since we care—and especially because we want people to believe that we care—we can’t be all “stick.” We need some “carrot,” too. It’s not enough to restrict the supply of opportunities, because some people will break the rules or work around them. We also need to suppress demand by offering some sweet incentives for young workers to stay unproductive and uncompetitive. We need to make non-participation in the market more attractive than participation.

First, I recommend a strict policy of forced education for the first few decades of life. We’ve already discussed making it illegal for the young to work or the poor to work for low wages. But we also need to make it mandatory that they do something else, and something that won’t make them more likely to compete with us now or later. We should create giant institutions where we send them all day to follow rules and do what they’re told without question. We don’t want them becoming innovative, or pursuing passions and interests that they might become experts in and thus supplant us in the market. They must only learn what the bureaucrats who run the system tell them to. (Oh, and the people who run the system should only be those who don’t really know much about competing in the market, because we wouldn’t want them passing on such knowledge.)

We can’t just make school mandatory. Many would still play hooky if it cost too much. We also need to hide the cost by paying for the whole thing through taxes and borrowing. We need to subsidize it so much that alternatives can’t compete. We need to weave a narrative about its glory so that no one wants to opt out.

But 18 years isn’t enough. We need to keep these young, hungry individuals out of our way as long as possible. I say we artificially lower the cost of otherwise very expensive degree programs and advanced studies. We can guarantee low-interest loans, throw a lot of grants and subsidies around, and always, always parrot powerful propaganda about the inestimable value of classroom learning. Let’s make the most attractive option—socially and economically—the one that keeps them from the commercial world as long as possible.

The longer we can make the education process, the better for us. Defer, defer, defer the time at which young people start entering the productive sector. The more loans they take on in the process, the better. Maybe they’ll even get married, get a nice house (we can incentivize the buying of expensive consumer goods via debt as well!), and have kids. All of these things are good because they take away one of the major advantages the young have in the workforce—their low cost of living and hence ability to bid for lower starting wages. We want them saddled with so much debt that they have to earn high wages to get by, and thus have to compete with workers who are a lot more experienced for those higher wage jobs. We need them coming out of college looking for salaries that don’t comport with their skill levels. This increases the odds that older workers like us will win.

We’ll need to address those too old or too poor for school as well. We need basic income guarantees, food stamps, and all manner of welfare to cover the costs of low-income life such that no part-time entry-level job could pay quite as much. Again, we need to make not working worth more than working.

The best part

Here’s the best part: By the time these young and poor find themselves unable to compete, with costly lifestyles and loans to maintain and little skill or experience, they’ll be older. They’ll join our ranks. They’ll lobby for even harsher restrictions on those even less experienced and less well-off than they are. They’ll demand to get the low-skill jobs they’re qualified for, but demand the pay be raised to high-skill wages. They’ll make the list of degrees and credentials they’ve accumulated the new barrier to entry to artificially raise their market value. They’ll help us perpetuate the very policies that caused their plight!

As with the first prong, these are but a few examples. Ideally a massive and shifting bundle of incentives to not enter the market as a producer can be put together: education mandates and subsidies, tax incentives to spend rather than save and to purchase education rather than other goods or business tools, housing and healthcare as long as you don’t work, and rewards for any activity that makes one less likely to try to compete with us in the market.

These policies will subtly turn the attention of nearly everyone away from value creation, innovation, and serving customers—all of which might threaten our dormancy. It will turn everyone’s attention and energy to fighting over the details of these policies and programs, to who gets which slice of the artificially limited pie and at whose expense. Some of us can really take advantage by running for political office and dividing up the warring interests we’ve created by promising them more restrictions and subsidies.

Above all, with both prongs of this strategy, we need a narrative that calls these policies noble, compassionate, and wise. We need them to be perceived as humanitarian aid to the young and poor, not as ways to keep them from succeeding. We need to make these programs universal values in themselves—regardless of the outcomes they produce. Who could oppose better wages? Who could oppose more education? Who could oppose more loans for homes or college? Who could oppose work rules and consumer safety regulations? Middle-aged, middle-class people certainly won’t, if we know what’s good for us.

We cannot abide an America in which plucky newcomers outperform us at every turn. Join me in securing our future.

Originally published in The Freeman.

What Does a Degree Signal?

There are plenty of critics of college.  It’s not uncommon to hear prominent pundits challenge the prevailing narrative that everyone should go to college.  Many contrarians say that too many young people are going to college, not too few.  They say that higher education is well-suited for the smart, hard-working, above average types, but too many mediocre students are attending.  They say it works better when only the best and brightest attend.  I think most of these critics have it backwards.

A degree is a signal.  It is well established that higher education’s primary value, and hence business model, is as a sorting mechanism rather than a forming mechanism.  Sure, you learn and change and gain things through the typical four year experience.  But all of those things could be had without being a registered student.  The only reason people keep paying to make the experience official is because of the signalling value of a transcript.  Given this fact, it follows that the signal would provide the most value for the marginal students, and the least value for the smartest, hardest working, highest achieving (not merely academic achievement, which doesn’t always mirror what matters in the world outside the walls of the classroom).  In other words, college is far more valuable to an average person who is content to put in less effort it than an above average talent who is very ambitious.

Considering how widespread the granting of degrees is, and considering the talent level of the typical college classroom, the degree doesn’t signal much.  It signals that you are average.  You’re like most other people.  If you’re at or below average, it can be valuable to have a way to let people know this.  If you’re above average, you want signals that demonstrate that you are, not merely those that lump you in with average.  Look around a college classroom and remember; what you’re purchasing is a signal that says, “I’m about the same as these people.”  For many of the sharpest, hardest working students, a degree signal greatly undersells them.

So much so that degrees have actually become a reverse signal in some circles.  In the venture capital world, it’s not uncommon for investors to count skipping or dropping out of college as a big plus for founders they want to invest in.  Entrepreneurs who have the courage to pursue their vision in the face of social pressure signal something really powerful.  Some of the most interesting people and opportunities in the world want an answer to the question, “Why did you go to college?”, rather than why didn’t you.  If you’ve got drive, creativity, and smarts above average, why did you choose the relatively easy, prevailing path?  Why did you wait four years to get started on the really good stuff?

Like most critics, I agree that college is not for everyone.  Where I disagree is that I think those who benefit least from it are those who are smartest and hardest working and most able to do more without it.  College is a least common-denominator signal.

Good Enough for a Dog?

I’m not a dog owner, but everyone else seems to really love their dogs.  So much so, that if I offered the following service, most would consider it beneath them as pet owners to take me up:

Every work day, you’ll wake your dog before it wants to get up, force feed it some breakfast, and tie it to a pole at the corner of your street, then go to work.  A giant vehicle with no safety harnesses will stop by and load your dog, along with fifty or sixty other dogs, and haul them off to a huge dog daycare center.

The dogs will be crammed thirty or forty to a room, and each room will have one person there to look after them, and make them go through a number of drills and activities that dogs hate, sitting still the whole time, not being allowed to do what dogs really want to do – run around.  This supervisor will be unionized and paid based on years of service, with little or no connection to how well your dogs fare under their care.  Some are good people who like dogs, though many found veterinary school too challenging and would struggle to gain employment as private dog trainers, groomers, or sitters.

At noon, hundreds of dogs will funnel into one huge room where they’ll eat stuff of lower quality than what you give them at home.  Then back to the little room where they’ll be forced, once again, through activities with dozens of dogs of radically different sizes, tendencies, breeds, abilities, and behaviors.  Your dog may be a loyal and gentle Lab, paired up for an activity with a few vicious Pit bulls and a Rottweiler   They’ll have to learn to adapt.

If your dog acts up, fails to complete activities, resists commands or any other kind of behavior generally frustrating to the supervisor, the dog will be punished, shamed, confined to a small cage, possibly drugged, and you’ll likely get a stern rebuke.

Just before you get home from work, your dog will be carted back to your street on the bus of rowdy creatures, and left to wander home.  There it will wait for you to return, and when you do, you will have the duty of looking over a stack of papers sent home with your pet.  They detail several hours more of activities you must force your dog to do before it goes to sleep so it can be ready to be awakened while it’s still dark the next day to do it all over.

The whole program will cost upwards of $10,000 for your dog each year, summer excluded.  The good news is, you will be forced to pay this fee for all your neighbors, and they’ll be forced to pay it for you via monthly charges on your property value and earnings.  Even those with no dogs and no desire to have dogs will pay, and those with tons of dogs will pay the same.  Payment won’t be based on the service at all, but on how much money you have.

You’ll send your dog here every day for years, during the most active and formative years of the animal’s life.  You’ll have to have special permits and permission to opt-out, and you’ll be treated like a crazy, neglectful person if you do – even if you quit your job just to stay home to raise, care for, and train your dog yourself.

Just about every dog owner I’ve ever met would consider this an outrageously offensive rip-off that borders on animal abuse.  Most of those same people beam with pride and “spirit” while putting their children through the same basic routine.

Education and Bike Riding

If the goal of education is to prepare young people for living, then an ideal program would look very different from most of what is now called education.

Earlier this week I wrote about the need for children to have a free space within which to grow in tastes, talents, will and ideas before they feel the full weight of a world that will try to mold them. This free space is there that they may grow strong and ready to handle the world, not to keep them from it for life. If education is meant to play a similar role – a partially simulated reality to prepare students for the “real world” – it seems a highly successful education would have two features we almost never see:

1 – It would be incredibly short

2 – It would be very hard to tell when it ended

If the goal is to prepare for life – i.e. to make education unnecessary – the faster the simulation can transition into the real, the better. And if living well is the aim, it would seem odd to spend a lot of time learning how in a simulated world and then abruptly be sent out into the real world without dabbling in it with increasing frequency until it began to replace education.

Imagine if we taught kids how to ride a bike the way we try to teach them how to have a career. We’d start by showing them pictures of a bike when they’re young. We’d teach them to say the word bike, then spell it, then write it neatly. We’d have them draw a picture of a bike. We’d have them measure the perimeter of a picture of a bike. We’d have them write stories about people riding bikes. We’d ask them to share what kind of bike they want when they grow up.

When they reached their teens, every once in a while someone would show them a real bike and describe what riding it is like. They wouldn’t be allowed to touch it, and certainly not to own or ride one. In fact, anyone who let them would be subject to serious legal trouble. Then, after seventeen or eighteen years of this (never more or less), we’d have a big ceremony congratulating them and ourselves at their successful completion of bike riding prep.

They’d be allowed to ride now, but it would be looked down upon. Instead, they’d be encouraged to hone their skills and really learn to ride by paying tens of thousands of dollars to spend the next four years getting drunk and hearing specialized bike-related knowledge. They’d hear the history of bikes, mostly from professors who hate bikes. They’d hear about the ecosystem where the rubber trees grow that go into bike tires, except any connection between that ecosystem and the actual building and riding of bikes would be deemed in poor taste. They’d learn a great many other things and come away with a certificate declaring their level of bike preparedness.

We’d celebrate and buy them something (but not a bike). Then they’d go out and try to obtain a bike in a highly competitive market. If they were able to purchase one, they’d have to learn, for the first time after two decades of studying but never trying, to ride.

If at any point in this decades-long process a child decided they’d learned all they needed, quit, and picked up a bike to start riding, it would be deemed a miserable failure. Even though the stated goal is to get them riding, it’s not their ability to ride that determines the success of the system, only the number of students who complete it. Figuring out how to ride and riding before the appointed time is a sign of trouble and rebellion, and would be discouraged at all costs.

This is obviously a stupid way to teach bike-riding, yet it’s how we train kids for life.

Imagine kids blending learning with working from the time they were ready and willing to work. Imagine kids moving from reading to doing the same way they go from training wheels to two wheels – quickly, and often without a lot of fanfare or even a clear-cut transition. Imagine allowing some skinned knees, some wobbly attempts, some bumping into the neighbors mailbox while trying to figure out how to navigate the world. Think of the sheer joy and freedom kids experience when they can fly through the neighborhood on two wheels, and imagine how much greater when they can create value, exchange, cooperate, buy and sell on their own ability and will.

Instead we force kids into a simulated world for decades, then celebrate their completion of our programs, regardless of whether they’ve actually gained what they need to succeed. Then we let them wander the world for the first time, trying to learn in months what we prohibited them from trying for years.

Why do the social norms about education persist when they are so blunt and detrimental to so many kids?