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The popular idea behind schooling is simple enough — you take some time away from family to become a socialized, well-adjusted member of society and learn the basics necessary to navigate life. Once you get to a certain age, if you’ve picked up these basics, you get the opportunity to branch off into something new and exclusive, like medicine, law, accounting, sales, engineering, or any number of other fields. Once you have children, they follow a similar process. You enter into the educated class and have new opportunity as a consequence of your schooling.
Competition isn’t an inherently good thing, especially on the individual level.[i] The cult of competition tells us that we have to focus on one-upping each other for a limited set of laurels. At my college it was competition over either pre-professional tracks or graduate-school tracks. Everybody wanted to land the internship with Goldman Sachs or Merrill Lynch. Everybody needed to get the perfect GPA so that he could get into the best medical school. A student at another top-tier school told me that students in her classes would compete to keep their GPAs high so that they could go to
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Competition can be a good motivator if you know why you are engaging in it. If you aren’t entirely sure why you are competing, or if your competing is entirely status-driven then competition actually quashes your ability to make personal progress. To make personal progress you must first focus on what you want to
achieve and build plans on how to carry this out. The competitive mindset is the antithesis of this. The difference between the personal mindset and the competitive mindset is where the locus of change sits. In the personal mindset the locus of change is with the individual.
The great paradox of status-driven competition is that everybody’s focus is on everybody else.
Y Combinator co-founder Paul Graham has an essay called “The Top Idea in Your Mind.”[iii] This is essentially the idea that governs most of your actions. The moment of clarity you have in the shower in the morning, Graham says, is an example of the top idea in your mind.
Universities and colleges weren’t causes of aristocracy and wealth; they were products of aristocracy and wealth. Aristocrats didn’t send their children to universities to make sure they got the tools necessary to stay aristocrats -- they sent them because it was essentially several years of leisure and only the most well-off could afford such a lifestyle.
The university was never intended to train people for high-wage jobs or to lift them up the economic ladder. At best it was an institution to train the clergy in the Middle Ages and then academics in the industrial age. This is why liberal-arts schools place such heavy emphasis on academic subjects -- they were designed to create professors.
The myth that more formal schooling means more success is exactly that -- a myth. The United States is a culture that has been built by those who didn’t wait for four years before taking on life: Thomas Edison, Cornelius Vanderbilt, Andrew Carnegie, John D. Rockefeller, Henry Ford, Mark Twain, Frank Lloyd Wright, Howard Hughes, Buckminster Fuller, Larry Ellison, Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, James Cameron, Travis Kalanick, Mark Zuckerberg, and Harrison Ford are just a few examples.
At it’s core this is a double standard. It’s a double standard that tells college dropouts, “You won’t be successful unless you reach the status of the megasuccessful.” Even more egregiously, it tells them, “If you aren’t successful, you have nobody else to blame but yourself because you decided to drop out of college.”
Nobody tells the college graduate, “You better be as successful as [the president of the United States, the chairman of Goldman Sachs, the CFO of Deloitte]! If you aren’t as successful as [arbitrary standard I choose], then you have nobody else to blame but yourself because you decided to go to college!”
The idea that college is a good place to figure out what you want is deeply flawed because it is an environment and institution almost entirely isolated from the real world, without real consequences for failure or success, and without real incentives (i.e., prices, profit, loss) influencing it.
The best way to actually acquire a vertically diverse network is to go out and work somewhere. Working at a high-growth startup is one of the best ways of doing this because it is high-risk and high-reward. If the startup succeeds, you gain the connections and laurels of being on a successful team. If it fails, you have at least gained the professional connections of those who joined you.
Let me be clear: I am not opposed to education. It is my love of education that drove me away from school.
Not all education is schooling, and not all classes are schooling. For some people, classes are the best way to learn, but this doesn’t mean they have to be enrolled in school in the traditional sense.
You need not be a radical autodidact to find that school does a terrible job educating. From social pressures to majoring in “marketable” subjects to putting assignment minutiae before learning as a whole, schools create and reinforce incentive systems that make it difficult to focus on education first and foremost.
It’s time that we rethought the idea that education and work are to be divided. We get the most out of both when we experience them concurrently.
Think about the things you hate. Now think of all the jobs you could work in where you would be doing those things you hate as seldom as possible.
Find a company near you that you think does something interesting and inspirational, a company for which you would be happy to wake up in the morning and go to work. Find the highest-ranking person in that company and write an email explaining your background, experience, and reasons for wanting to work there. Make your request clear: let me work for you.
Making yourself indispensable is your first step towards landing a job.
The absurdist philosopher Albert Camus wrote in The Myth of Sisyphus that there is no objective meaning to life. Life is, in Camus’s words, absurd. We have to come to grips with this fact and create our own meaning from this lack of meaning. Only when we can delight in this fact can we find our own drive and fulfillment. To assume that this is the same for all the students in a classroom, let alone all the subjects of the federal Department of Education, assumes that there is a standard by which one can create meaning from the absurd.
schools. The ability to craft meaning and fulfillment from the world is something that is unique for each individual person and can only be crafted through experience with and interaction in the world. The point to childhood is no different than the point to adulthood: there is no point. The point is to find meaning and fulfillment for ourselves. This is a deeply personal and subjective experience, and one that cannot be taught via scantron bubbles and school-wide textbooks.
This artificial division only delays the necessity to confront the reality that life has no definite purpose outside of what the individual crafts for it (whether that be religious, spiritual, entrepreneurial, intellectual, artistic, or any combination does not matter). We owe young persons something better than the infantilization brought with the concept of childhood.
The goal ought to be to prepare people when they are young to know what they want, and then to go get it, not to go get some goal that brings a certain level of social approbation and hope that it coheres with what the individual wants.
“Constructivism,” or the belief that most or all institutions (including informal institutions like language, norms, mores, and mindsets) should or are “deliberately constructed by somebody,” permeates the schooled mindset.
In time, I ended up enjoying math, but only through the freedom to use it in clubs and extracurricular events (e.g., music activities, physics activities, statistics, etc.) from which I derived meaning. While reading and writing came naturally to me and were the bedrocks of the things I enjoyed doing, math was different.
Most learning is not the result of instruction. It is rather the result of unhampered participation in a meaningful setting. Most people learn best by being “with it,” yet school makes them identify their personal, cognitive growth with elaborate planning and manipulation.
But here’s the thing about the vast majority of the relationships that you build in school: they’re entirely artificial.
Real, natural friendships are formed based on shared values, mutual interests, and a common respect for a vision of the community you wish to build in your life. When your choices for community are so limited and controlled as they are in school, your options for friendship become limited and distorted.
The market is a multifaceted system of positive- and negative-feedback loops. Through a price system of profit and loss, firms can get a better idea of what works and doesn’t work than by going to a central authority whose expertise is to be trusted on the matter (as in academia).
If you’ve ever thought about creating a 4-hour workweek, launching your own business, or becoming an artist, you must reject this mindset. There will be other people out there who tell you that you can’t do those things; “you aren’t playing by the rules,” “what about your career?” ”How can you do that if you don’t have a business/art degree?” They will start to wear down on you if you don’t reject this mindset entirely.
Rather than allowing them to integrate themselves into the broader scheme of life and learn what they get fulfillment from achieving and what they don’t, school leaves fulfillment to five letter grades and a few minutes of recess.
by encouraging and compelling them to work for petty and contemptible rewards, gold stars, or papers marked 100 and tacked to the wall, or A’s on report cards, or honor rolls, or dean’s lists, or Phi Beta Kappa keys, in short, for the ignoble satisfaction of feeling that they are better than someone else.”
This is the perfect formula for creating a group of constantly bored people. They’ve been deprived of a chance to find meaning for themselves in subjects by engaging with them on a deep level and internalizing the responsibility necessary to live in the world. They’ve been cut off from opportunities to make real connections with people based on more than a lottery of ZIP codes for a decade. They’ve been taught that achievement is getting to the next level set by people outside of themselves.
People are not segmented and separated by age in the workplace, sorted by last name in civil society, forced to walk with their arms at their sides in a single-file line, and expected to shut up and sit down everywhere they go. The background assumption — that traditional schooling socializes children better than homeschooling — is absurd when you really think of it, too. The idea that people will only socialize when they are forced to do so is silly at best and authoritarian at worst.
At home, the family dynamic is spoiled by the school day. The few hours left for family time are devoted to eating, getting ready for bed (to get children up at the crack of dawn to do the whole miserable day all over again), and homework, leaving little time for organic family bonding. Add into this mix that children rarely are enthusiastic about homework and going to school and parents are forced to be enforcers for the school at home.
So the children come to view their parents as an extension of the drudgery of school. Somebody has to crack the whip to do worksheets at home if the person who cracks the whip at school can’t
They spent 15,000 hours of their young lives learning that adults are people who impose drudgery on them. The little time they could be spending building relationships with adults is devoted to doing this drudgery, lest they be left behind.
Schools are rife with bullying, drug abuse, gossip, and cliques. Schools are breeding grounds for the very worst of socialization.
Schooling is at best a bad way to get children to socialize properly with other children and is, at worst, cruel. Almost every case of teenage suicide is related back to problems socializing with other kids at school.
Putting a dog in a cage for 8 hours every day, where it cannot engage in natural behavior, cannot even go to the bathroom without permission, will have to put up with other aggressive dogs and has no real way to deal with this, will cost the owner $10,000+, will stymy the dog’s growth and could turn it into an asocial shut-in, and pretty much deprive it of the outlets it needs to flourish as a dog would be insane. Why do we do the same to children?
The probability of making more money increases with a degree for the average person. The probability of needing a college degree to be successful is higher for the average person. The probability of being a lawyer, doctor, or accountant drastically increases with a degree.
If you asked the average high school graduate if they feel like they learned a lot in school, they’d laugh at you. If you asked the average college grad why they went to college, they wouldn’t tell you that it was to get an education, but rather to get a job. If you asked a doctor, lawyer, or academic why they went to their respective graduate programs, their answer would similarly be “so I could become a [doctor/lawyer/professor].”
By monopolizing school’s possession on learning, anybody who existed outside of the schooling paradigm would be thought to not be learning.
Real education happens when we engross ourselves in projects that we derive meaning from and find interesting and fulfilling. If a school can do this, then it has a shot at being a place of education.
Take a moment as the reader and think about what you knew four years ago and what you know now. Now imagine if most of this time were spent with indecision and unclear social pressures tearing you in every different direction.
William Deresiewicz’s recent book Excellent Sheep also makes the case that top students are best off avoiding elite universities.
Elite students climb confidently until they reach a level of competition sufficiently intense to beat their dreams out of them. Higher education is the place where people who had big plans in high school get stuck in fierce rivalries with equally smart peers over conventional careers like management consulting and investment banking.
Your major does not need to determine what you will do in your life. It is not your identity. Just as you are not your political beliefs, not your religion, and not your degree, you are not your major.
Most people agree with this, but most people betray it in their speech and actions. At holiday parties, on dating sites, and at family events, somebody is sure to ask a young, 18-24 year-old, “what’s your major?” early in the conversation. If the answer isn’t sufficiently satisfying to the questioner, it is usually followed with a “what are you going to do with that?” With such pressures from friends and family, it isn’t surprising that young people then start to categorize their professional options according to major.
