The End of School: Reclaiming Education from the Classroom

by Zachary Slayback

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 ela...

Problems could only be solved and given points if you “showed your work” and did the work in the way the teacher wanted.

It is likely that she’ll come to resent reading, and will forever lag behind other students in it.

The fact of the matter is that different people learn things at different times and in different ways.

school is not a real, natural environment.

Most learning is not the result of instruction. It is rather the result of unhampered participation in a meaningful setting.

One of the greatest lies we tell young children is that they go to school to learn.

There’s a real danger to telling young children that they must go to school so that they must learn.

learning is at the core of our lives as human beings.

We must learn to survive.

The coopting of the language of education by advocates of compulsory schooling in the 20th century was the greatest crime to learning committed in recent history.

“You mean to tell me you spend 9 hours every day in the same building? Doing things other people make you?

How do you learn, then?”

THERE NEVER WAS A GOLDEN AGE OF HIGHER ED

We shouldn’t expect students, then, to put in inordinate time outside of class to learn what the market wants — they have little immediate incentive to do so while enrolled as students.

The best incentive for self-betterment and skill development comes outside academia entirely.

the idea that any one group is better fit to rule you or your life should be incredibly foreign.

Is it any surprise that when people don’t know what to do, they simply go to graduate school?

school teaches apathy towards education and detachment from the world.

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

They’ve been cut off from opportunities to make real connections

Pain isn’t the opposite of happiness — boredom is.

status quo bias

Change happens by people not realizing it is happening.

we can see that people learn without imposed curricula.

The strongest, deepest learning comes from engaging in meaningful,

voluntary behavior and actions.

The background assumption — that traditional schooling socializes children better than homeschooling — is absurd

the children come to view their parents as an extension of the drudgery of school.

Schools are breeding grounds for the very worst of socialization.

Would I choose to put myself through this?

“would I put a dog through this?” Dogs are, after all, treated similarly to children in many families.

They tend to focus on probabilities and insurances.

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.

you aren’t a lottery ticket.

Probabilities apply to aggregates and not to individuals,

The downside of a commitment like college is bigger than most people think.

Despite the fact that most people are glad to admit that their own schooling adventure wasn’t the primary locus of their learning, and despite the fact that they will then admit that they attended optional additional schooling not to learn, but to get past gatekeepers for other things they want to do, many find it difficult to wrap their minds around the idea that learning can happen outside of a formal classroom.

Twelve, sixteen, or twenty years of schooling is not the end of education.

the things that actually are learned at college are either outdated or not wanted in the first place,

college is a place where many young people spend 4 years insulated from the marketplace, learning from people who have

never spent time in the marketplace,

If college were seen as one option among many for your average- or high-achieving young person, many fewer would attend.

The assumption that “something is better than nothing” would be true if it weren’t for the fact that four years is a long time and you can do a lot in that time.

Even somebody who spends these years in the most stereotypically dead-end career choice is learning more than many students drifting through generic colleges.

“You’ll have a degree under your belt, but will have passed up four formative years of your life to engage in some of the most interesting opportunities you’ll ever have and you are now out of $50,000.” When framed this way, can so many people be as comfortable in saying that college is just something you do because it is better than nothing?

Can’t find a job at 23? You should have finished that degree.

Excellent Sheep