If you find it easier to engage new perspectives through travel, then travel far and wide. If you find it more fulfilling to curl up on your couch and read novels without ever leaving your apartment, stay local without guilt.
Tag: education
Never Stop Studying
If you want to be a successful professional, refuse to settle at your current level of intellectual development. Study your butt off and never stop challenging yourself to become a better thinker. If you’re content with the books you’ve already read, your career is already dead.
“I Dropped Out, Now What?”
I see a lot of questions like this on Quora. It always strikes me as odd to be asking “What should I do” only in light of being a dropout. As if sitting on the education conveyor belt doesn’t require you to ask this same question.
Superstition Still Plagues Humanity
When I think of behaviors or convictions from the past now considered superstitious, I can’t help but find many modern analogs. It’s not difficult when we define superstition as follows: a belief in something in spite of the absence of supporting facts or evidence.
Why Most Homeschooling Systems Devolve, and Why You Can’t Plan a Startup
The notion of a year-long plan created in an Ivory Tower and imposed on all students of the same age without deviation no matter what market feedback is coming is absurd and tyrannical. Imagine an incubator like Y-Combinator paying some smarties to come up with The One True Business Model, roll-out schedule, target market, hiring strategy, budget, and action plan, and imposing it upon every one of the startups in their program. Oh, and demanding every company produce and sell the exact same product.
Yellowstone
I see that the world, regardless of the natural effects of humans, proceeds in a way that is nearly oblivious to our small presence. Does the Earth care who is POTUS today, or what he may do with regard to the Paris Accord?
Self-Directed Education and the Freedom to Choose
Boston College psychology professor, and Alliance for Self-Directed Education founder, Dr. Peter Gray, writes that the freedom to quit is the most basic human freedom. He asserts: “In general, children are the most brutalized of people, not because they are small and weak, but because they don’t have the same freedoms to quit that adults have.”
Solitary Confinement is Appallingly Common In Public Schools
If parents were to lock their children in a confined space for a lengthy period of time, it is highly likely that those parents would be arrested for child abuse and their parental rights threatened. (In fact, this just happened in Arizona recently.) If public schools do this, however, the outcome is quite different.
Compulsory Schooling Is Incompatible with Freedom
If we care about freedom, we should reject compulsory schooling. A relic of 19th-century industrial America, compulsory schooling statutes reduced the broad and noble goal of an educated citizenry into a one-size-fits-all system of state-controlled mass schooling that persists today.
School Should Be More Like Summer Camp
Perhaps we should look more to summer for the solutions to our school-year woes, and challenge a system that puts more emphasis on containment than freedom.