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 Greatest Lie We Tell Children
One of the greatest lies we tell young children is that they go to school to learn.
Require a Degree At Your Own Risk
Let’s say you are an employer of a fast-paced, growing, interesting small-to-medium sized organization. Every person you hire has a huge impact on your organization, and they can make or break the team with which they are placed. You put a lot of effort and resources into guaranteeing that those you hire are the right culture, […]
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 […]
Some Bad Arguments Against Homeschooling
If you pull the average American off the street and ask them to describe what they think the average homeschool family looks like, they’d probably paint the picture of a bunch of children and adults wearing pleated khakis, button-downs with sweaters, socially awkward children, sheltered and overly-structured in their lives (or, oddly enough, totally unstructured in their […]
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 […]
A Brief Defense of Playing-as-Learning
An indignant commenter on one of the pages I follow argues with homeschool parents on facebook, saying they only opposed public schools because they did poorly in them and they are bad facilitators of learning because they let their children play.
“Would I Put Myself Through This?”
There are plenty of different ways to organize how we think about different types of schools (here and here, and more forthcoming). We can look at whether the school is authoritarian or libertarian, to what ends the curriculum is designed, who controls the direction of learning, who makes administrative decisions, and more.
Deschooling Myself
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. — Ivan Illich, Deschooling Society
What Is Childhood?
Yesterday, I asked what the purpose of childhood is. Since childhood, and the purpose to which it is oriented via education and schooling, is defined in terms of success at adulthood, and since success at adulthood is something we cannot define, childhood, I conclude, has no definite purpose. The purpose of childhood, if anything, is the […]
What Is The Purpose of Childhood?
The average child spends eight-to-ten hours in school every day of the week — getting up before dawn, standing in the cold, getting on a bus, and sitting through learning materials that have been pre-determined to be necessary for their success as students. The average American elementary schooler spends 934 hours in school per year, […]
In Praise of Hands-Free Teachers
I was publicly schooled all through my upbringing (minus a Montessori pre-K that I attended) and I am — by all conventional measures — fairly successful so far in life. I can read, write, and do calculations on the right-side of a normal distribution, I was accepted to an Ivy League institution, I’ve worked on […]
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 […]
Some Ways to Think About Schooling, Part II: Authoritarian/Libertarian
Yesterday, I offered a few different ways to think about and categorize different models of schooling and mapped some of these models onto 2×2 matrices. Schools can be categorized in terms of their curriculum (open/closed), their centralization (centralized/decentralized), their setting of instruction (individualist/collectivist), and their setting of attendance (personal/communal). These allow us to categorize schools […]
Some Ways to Think About Schooling, Part I
Traditional schooling is unnatural, harmful, and stymies the social, intellectual, and cognitive development of young people. This is essentially the thesis of MIT Psychologist Peter Gray’s excellent 2013 work Free to Learn. Gray recounts his son telling him to “go to hell” after he and his wife try to keep him in a traditional school, […]