How to Take a Gap Year
As I get more exposure to a better data set of young professionals who know what they want to do and don’t waste time floating around between different skills and jobs, one of the constants that has come up as been gap years. A gap year provides an opportunity for a young person or young […]
Get my Foreword to John Taylor Gatto’s Dumbing Us Down
I couldn’t be more excited to publicly announce that I had the honor of writing the foreword to the 25th Anniversary Edition of John Taylor Gatto’s Dumbing Us Down: The Hidden Curriculum of Compulsory Schooling. If you’ve never read this book, place a pre-order for the new edition now. If you have read the book, buy a […]
Wealth and Risk: Don’t Shoot for the Middle
Risk-taking is an important part of innovation for an economy and an important part of living an interesting life for individuals. Most innovations come not from the high ivory towers of research and “innovation labs” but from tinkerers and risk-takers trying to find better ways of doing things. Interesting lives don’t come from sitting in […]
Hunter S. Thompson on Reaching a Goal and Enjoying Life
[A] man must choose a path which will let his ABILITIES function at maximum efficiency toward the gratification of his DESIRES. In doing this, he is fulfilling a need (giving himself identity by functioning in a set pattern toward a set goal), he avoids frustrating his potential (choosing a path which puts no limit on […]
The O-B-S-C-E-N-I-T-Y of Spelling Bees
The annual Scripps National Spelling Bee made headlines today with the announcement of a new champion. Stories like this one at CNN gush over and theorize about how students from certain backgrounds perform better than others. Other stories focus on how much practice goes into each performance. Or how the events are sources of great pride […]
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 […]
What Skills Should You Learn?
Any discussion about college and the failure of young people to enter the workforce upon graduation with in-demand skill sets will give time and space to ambiguous “real skills,” but few actually go into what skills are exactly in demand.
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.
Hayek and Camus Walk Into A School
There are practically as many philosophies of education as there are schools in the United States. There are the Prusso-American schools of Horace Mann’s age, there are the public schools of the No Child Left Behind era, there are parochial schools of varying denominations, there are different types of military, boarding, and prep schools, there are Montessori, […]
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 […]
Mike Rowe on Elitism in Employment and Opportunity
I had the pleasure of watching, via Livestream, “The Diploma Dilemma: Exploring the Costs and Value of College Education” hosted at the Newseum in DC the other night. The guests included the former president of American University, an executive from US News and World Reports, Ohio University’s Richard Vedder, and Discovery Channel’s Mike Rowe. The […]