Deschooling Your Writing: How to Write for Real People (Not Teachers)

I’ve always enjoyed writing. It is one of the few activities through which I can fairly regularly achieve a state of flow and really focus my efforts into an act of creation. I’ve been pretty good at it, too — at least that’s what the schools told me. I recently revisited some of my writing […]

If You Want to Work On a Startup, Avoid College Loans

Joining a startup team is an amazing, wild, incredibly worthwhile experience. You get to work on a growing project, see real, tangible products of your work on an innovative, risk-taking team, and you are forced to grow your skills daily in order to succeed. It’s an experience I would encourage almost any young person to […]

You Graduated! Now Deschool Yourself

Congratulations, Class of 2015! You’ve completed your higher education journey and graduated from college! Sure, you may be the most indebted in history (until 2016, that is), and there’s a good chance you’ll be employed in a position that doesn’t actually require a degree, but you went for the gold that was expected of you for success […]

A Distractionless Retreat

I am currently at the Praxis company retreat in Wilmington, NC, with my colleagues at a beach house with nothing but a notebook, a pen, and several books. No phones. No computers. No tablets. No screens at all. (This post was written earlier this week and scheduled for today.)

A Deschooling Reading List for Starters

Deschooling yourself is a long psychological, emotional, and spiritual process for somebody who has spent 12+ years in traditional schools. You come to view the world, incentives, and success in a very different — but very subtly different — way than somebody with a deschooled mind. Breaking out of that mold, viewing the world as an […]

My Podcast with Isaac Morehouse on Education, Aviation, and Innovation

I joined Isaac Morehouse for a discussion on education, aviation, and innovation in the podcast below. We discussed some topics like college, schooling, deschooling, unschooling, and some thoughts on aviation and barriers to major innovation in that sector. [soundcloud url=”https://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/197801049″ params=”auto_play=false&hide_related=false&show_comments=true&show_user=true&show_reposts=false&visual=true” width=”100%” height=”450″ iframe=”true” /]

The “Steve Jobs Fallacy” of Opting Out of College

When a young person tells their friends and family they are thinking of dropping out of college, they may make reference to the successful college dropouts and opt-outs of our day. These men and women — the Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, Larry Ellisons, Travis Kalanicks, Richard Bransons of the world — figured they had better […]

10 Bad Common Arguments for College

Parents, teachers, and guidance counselors happily push bright young people under them off to four years of college with the belief that it will help them grow into successful, fulfilled adults. “It’s the best four years of your life!” “It’s so much better than high school!” “It will help you discover yourself and set you on […]

The College Trap and the Schooled Mind

I noted the other day how thinking in terms of your major when it comes to the job search can actually limit you more than it can open doors. When people start to identify as their major, they start to think that they can only do the things associated with that specific major. This isn’t just the […]

Schooling is Not Education; Or, a Lesson In Status Quo Bias

If you asked the average high school graduate if they feel like they learned a lot in school, they’d likely 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 […]

The Devil’s In the (Schooled) Details

Schoolteachers help me gain control of the minds of children not so much by what they teach the children as because of what they do not teach them. The entire public school system is so administered that it helps my cause by teaching children almost everything except how to use their own minds and think […]