Maturity Is Not Created by College

Here’s an interesting and well-written essay on what is like to be a young adult who became an unschooler in high school and who then decided not to go to college by Emma Zale that was published in the Daily Kos.

I was struck by this passage in particular, about the relationship between attending college and people’s perceptions of your maturity:

As I began to interact more and more with these mid-to-late-twenties/early-thirty somethings, I noticed something startling -- the majority of them were in the very same situation that I was. We were all working blue-collar (or more menial white-collar) jobs, trying to launch some kind of artistic or otherwise higher paying career. In the case of my co-workers, who were virtually all college graduates, I (the youngest among them) was their boss.

They felt like my peers, and whenever I admitted my age to them, they tended to be astonished. When I would reveal that I had not only never gone to college, I had dropped out of high school... their jaws would literally drop. “But you're so smart,” they would say. “You're so mature.”

To the latter I would often answer: “Well, I've been out of school for nearly 5 years,” and that seemed to resonate with them. But what does that say about what constitutes a person's maturity in the “real world”? Because I had been in it for as long as some of them had, I read as 25-30, when I was really just shy of my early 20s. It seemed that not only was college not always indicative of success, it wasn’t necessarily a barometer for maturity, either.

John Holt and Grant Colfax on Education in 1985

This past weekend I tried out a new version of my Teach Your Own seminar and I learned a lot, and I think most of those who attended felt they did, too. The seminar participants had great questions and responses that helped me realize new ways to arrange my format, and all agreed that I needed to allow more than three hours to complete the session. Since then, people from ME and NJ have asked me to bring the seminar to their states, and we’re working on it.

While rethinking this seminar I went through all my old files, speeches, and presentation materials and discovered some cool things I hadn’t seen or thought of in years. For instance, when we discussed allowing children to do real things and real work and how it helps integrate self-esteem and knowledge, I remembered this article about Grant Colfax from 1985. I didn’t include it on Saturday because I felt I had too much material (I most certainly did!), but I’m glad I remembered it to share with you.  First, there are some great quotes from John Holt in the article, but best of all, as a young person with a nontraditional education who got into Harvard, Grant has some very interesting observations that I hope you enjoy, too.

Open publication - Free publishing - More grant colfax

College and Learning Are Not Identical

Why push more people to complete four years of college when there are other less expensive ways to help them find work worth doing and lives worth living?

I am developing a much more detailed response to this question that I’ll post in the coming weeks, though I feel I’ve been responding to it in various forms for all of my 30-plus years in homeschooling, but I feel compelled to provide a quick reply today based on some contacts I’ve had related to this issue.

First, Dr. Robert Kay, a retired school psychiatrist who is a long-standing, unabashed supporter of alternatives to conventional school, recently wrote this letter to his local newspaper and shared it with me. Though not all the articles he cites are current they are nonetheless still true and relevant and useful to anyone who wants to understand the issues involved. Further, some unschoolers will undoubtedly take exception to Bob’s claim that electronic gadgets should be rigidly controlled for the young, but Bob has his reasons for this. In fact, he rigidly controls his own computer use for these reasons, so if you want to engage him on this issue you’ll have to contact him via post or phone. Send me a private message and I’ll send you his contact information.

To the Editor:

While "Obama Calls for Restraining Rise in College Tuition" (News, Jan. 28) we might check out the Wall Street Journal of 8/13/08 -- "For Most People, College is a Waste of Time", a 10/06 op-ed in The Evening Bulletin -- "A Solution to the Fraud that is Higher Education", The New York Times of 4/27/09 -- "End the University as We Know It", and the Baltimore Sun -- "Is America's Love Affair with College on the Rocks?"

Not to mention the fact that in 2006 just 31% of college seniors were proficient in reading -- down from 40% in 1996 -- while, from K through most of graduate school, virtually all subject matter is happily forgotten come summertime.

So perhaps we should consult with wealthy Switzerland where 77% leave school at age 14 and then, as in the home/unschooling movements, HELP kids keep on learning with the joy, rapidity, and effectiveness of the average toddler especially if we rigidly control all electronic gadgets while exposing them to books, magazines, newspapers, libraries, museums, work, concerts, theater, movies, i.e., the wide, wide world. Meanwhile, we could check out the Inquirer article of 12/12/91 -- "Don't Try Another Choice Plan: Change the Very Nature of Schooling," plus three definitive works -- How Children Fail (Classics in Child Development) by John Holt, School is Dead (out of print) by Everett Reimer and Deschooling Society (Open Forum) by Ivan Illich.

Yours,

Robert E. Kay, MD

Related to this is an email I received from Helen Rubin, a GWS subscriber whose grown son, Dan, is doing well because of, not in spite of, unschooling. Helen shared Dan’s recent blog post about his educational background; he is a professional photographer and designer, but it is unclear if he even graduated college from the post. However, he is clear about who his most important teachers and experiences were and how they inspire him to want to make the world a better place.

So was there an “aha” moment where you really knew what you wanted to do?

I don’t know if there was a single point. If there was, it doesn’t come to mind. There was no epiphany but that kind of ties into the way I was raised. The most valuable thing my parents instilled in my brother and me is that if we’re passionate about something, or even interested in it, we should just do it and let it run its course and if it’s something we learn more about and decide we’re not interested in, that’s fine, but we didn’t decide that prematurely. Instead of one big moment, there were a series of moments, and those continue. That’s an ongoing thing with me. I probably chase those moments, to be honest.

You talked about some of your mentors and people who have supported you. Who has encouraged you the most on your creative path?

Um, it has to come down to my folks, ultimately. I don’t think I’ve had people in my life who aren’t encouraging, but the groundwork for all I do and who I am was established when I was young. They were enabling in the most positive ways, fostering and encouraging creativity. My family (Mum, Dad, Alex, and me), we’re the kind of people who recognize when someone is passionate about something and we will do whatever we have to do in order to encourage that person. I feel really lucky that I haven’t had any barriers, and because of that, I try to help others if I see someone who needs encouragement.

That’s cool. So then, do you feel a responsibility to contribute to something bigger than yourself and what do you hope to contribute?

I want to fix the world. I feel a constant pressure, not to do any one thing worthwhile, but that everything I do should make a difference. The only shame of it is that the drive to contribute to something doesn’t always result in me being able to do something. It isn’t always a clear path from, “I want to help, I want to make products that don’t suck, I want to fix every interface I see that’s difficult to use.” I think that’s my favorite thing about design as a broad term. To me, design is the medium through which I can improve the world.

Want to Learn? Don’t Go to College

PF: Nadia Jones, a homeschooler who is now a working adult, is a guest blogger for me today.

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For many in the United States of America, going to college has been considered a stepping stone to making money, despite the fact that hardly any of the skills one learns in college has any bearing on the daily tasks required of most jobs, even high-paying ones. The other, learning-based view of college is that a higher education is necessary in a civic sense—it helps mold young minds to think critically, to become more knowledgeable and sensitive about the world within them and around them. This has been the traditional (though now in our technocratic age, obsolete) view of the necessity of college.

As someone who has been to college, I can say without hesitation that neither objective was achieved after I graduated from a top-twenty liberal arts school only a few years ago. As an English major, I was not prepared for the job market in the slightest, unless you count learning to please superiors by agreeing with their point of view as an employable skill. Using the more traditional view of the importance of a higher education, the one that I believe in more whole-heartedly, I was equally disappointed. All the promises they fed me since orientation about being a scholar, about learning to think for myself, ended up being a beer-soaked, mind-numbing process of learning how to navigate the system.

This is how it works—you choose a few classes that sound interesting or that meet requirements. You attend them whether or not you feel like it. You work really hard to make good grades your first semester until you realize that there’s this thing called grade inflation. Grade inflation, a phenomenon in which higher grades are given for work that would have received lower grades in the past, is increasing rapidly, as noted in this New York Times article. The result is that we students learn that you don’t have to work hard, to improve over time, or to do anything really except to “win over” the professor.

Professors, whose performance (and pay) are increasingly being evaluated based on student reviews, and whose research dominates their professional lives, have no incentive to direct their students to achieve the goals of learning and critical thinking. As such, the student-professor relationship has become one that is based on a radical free-market ideology. Instead of students and professors, we have customers and salespeople. In this environment, the only positive outcomes are that students meet others who are much like them—reasonably smart but overly-opportunistic, entitled young men and women whose idea of success is going through the motions of college, grubbing for grades, going to parties, making friends, and networking for that high-paying job. In the process, learning is sacrificed.

Now do I regret having attended an institution of higher education? Not necessarily—I did have fun. But the fun incurred is not worth the student debt that now cripples my finances. I learned more by reading on my own before and after college than I ever learned in any of my classes. Even if college used to be a place where one could leave having learned to think and to evaluate independently, a college education in America now is nothing more than a four-year summer camp after which you earn a credential that everyone says you must have in order to succeed.

I question this logic, however, because I know several people, both friends and family members, who never went to college and are smarter, more enterprising, and dare I say, more successful, than 90% of the people I know who hold bachelor’s degrees. If you have an interest in working in academia, then yes, a college education is necessary. But for almost any other goal in life, whether personal or professional, it won’t help you much except to dig you deeper in debt. Trust me, I know.

Author Bio:

This is a guest post by Nadia Jones who blogs at online college about education, college, student, teacher, money saving, and movie-related topics. You can reach her at nadia.jones5 @ gmail.com.

Homeschoolers in the News and in College

Amy Milstein, an unschooler living in Manhattan, sent me this good article and video about homeschooling done by a local PBS affiliate. It is, I think, an honest, even-handed portrayal about why and how homeschooling and unschooling are done. The interview at the end of the video, with two unschoolers who did well in college, should be interesting to all parents who worry about their unconventionally raised children getting into higher education.

On that note, this recent article will also be of interest: 15 Key Facts About Homeschooled Kids in College.