Education: Formal VS DIY, How To Choose For Results

Education is an opportunity to bite the pie of intelligence accumulated by thousands of talented humans. An opportunity for growth, skill acquisition, practical application, and priceless life experience. An opportunity for personal, professional, and relational development. A liability, stripping you of thousands of dollars, millions of doors of possibility, and freedom to do, if picked incorrectly.

That’s A LOT Of Money!

Formal education is, eh… Unoptimized? Impractical? Lacking soft and hard skills? Overflowing with useless theory? Students drown themselves in debt in order to attain a fancy-schmancy paper. What often follows is a relearning of the fundamentals on the job—worse if they weren’t taught the fundamentals. Practice and theory just aren’t equals, or siblings, or distant relatives.

You mortgage yourself to a diploma you’ll hang on the wall. The paper—the paper proving you a civilized human being—is what you’re paying for. Trust me, you could afford some awesome fucking paintings for that many Benjamins. Student debt exceeds $1.753 trillion in the US. 42.8 million borrowers have federal student loan debt. Process that.

Formal Education?

Nearly 43 million people smothered in money they don’t own. If you want to learn, you don’t need to live with a bank balance in red for life. If you want a colorful paper in a frame as decor for your house, you do. Frank Zappa finishes the picture, “If you want to get laid, go to college. If you want an education, go to the library.”

Besides, prior to getting the “opportunity” to dive into the outdated curricula and impractical theory, you pass school. “Why am I learning this?” says every student, “I won’t need any of it!” The world is advancing at ever-faster rates, and our formal education is screwed. Screwed in ways beyond missing valuable skills. Screwed, and it needs an update, quick.

School Still Stinks

Why do we hear inventors, entrepreneurs, and top-notch scientists having dropped out? Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, John D. Rockefeller, Walt Disney, Ray Kroc, Ralph Lauren, and Charles Culpeper. Household names. Billion-dollar enterprises, life altering inventions, and software and hardware you use daily. You’d think they are reasonable. Agreed.

What does school do? Teaches students not to attain knowledge and put it to practice. Teaches the young minds to show they can stuff facts into their brain and regurgitate them. Memorization of useless facts as priority numero uno! One-up that classmate or your ego! Hooray! Excited to hit the books and hard classroom seats?!

Are We Ruining Students?

Approval-driven head filling. Grades. Underpaid teachers rush through the syllabus for you to store information. You vomit it on a piece of paper and forget it. Wow. Definitely promotes love for the subject—don’t you delight in historical dates, math formulae, and physics theories?!

Albeit, maybe the saddest downside of school is it stifles creativity. NASA found that of 1600 4 and 5-year-olds, 98 percent scored at “creative genius” level. Five years later, 30 percent did, and again, five years later, 12 percent of the same group. School encourages convergent, not divergent thought. No light bulbs. No free-flowing thought. No creative ideation. No, sit down and mark where you may be “right” or “wrong”, and shut up.

Real World Learning

In the fast-paced, action-oriented, always-on world, innovation is hard. To be a great entrepreneur, scientist, or artist is damn hard. School’s structured ways which discourage experimentation don’t make this any better. Not followed, your grades suffer. Adhered to, your creativity is stifled. You’re not likely to try things with no clear path and possibility of failure. Things which change the world.

Ponder on it for a minute, and you realize much the same is true for any formal education. Does not prepare you for the real world. School doesn’t. College doesn’t. MBAs don’t. Learning comes from going and doing and taking creative risks, not from reading textbooks.

Different Minds Different needs

I’m not saying education sucks. It depends on you, what you want to do, and why. Bill Gates dropped out of Harvard, but he got in only to access the latest computers. Elon Musk argues college is to prove you can do your chores, stay disciplined and socialize, and that knowledge can be gained from books or the internet. “Although I dropped out of college and got lucky pursuing a career in software,” said Gates, “getting a degree is a much surer path.”

Musk is right on one end. Ivy League graduates consistently report they didn’t need to go to college to learn, but to meet like-minded people . You definitely can self-educate yourself to greatness, personal, professional, or relational. AI is transformational. Books can teach you above and beyond what formal degrees offer. The internet? You answer, amigo.

Do It Yourself

Artificial intelligence can reform education as we know it. A new era. Chatbots, virtual tutors, smart project managers, and adaptive technologies have already flipped the work world upside down for some. Classrooms shouldn’t take long to adapt the robots for personalized learning. Automation and lower processing power means students won’t need teachers in the near future.

Albeit, acquiring knowledge and skills without the aid of a formal institution is plenty. Plus, there’s a thrill to the freedom and variety available in learning informally. You determine lacking skills and topics. You dial in your weaknesses to perform a function, not to be a walking and talking fucking encyclopedia. You master abilities which are genuinely needed in your job or pursuit—sales, marketing, product development, writing, coding.

Self-education is way cheaper and lets you attain the same end goal. Believe me, you can exceed those with formal degrees. Books, courses, coaches, and self-administered research provides insights colleges do not. The labor market, entrepreneurial wastelands, and economic landscape is evolving. You can outgrow the trend. Formal education doesn’t have a monopoly on knowledge.

Self-Education How-To

How do you self-educate? Rule number one: there are no rules. Determine what you want to learn, what tools and resources you want to use, and where you would practice the attained knowledge. Carve out a quick action-oriented plan—you want to connect knowledge to action as fast as possible (I.e. plan a programming project, non-fiction chapter of a certain length, application of knowledge in your job, etc.)

Once your little curriculum is formed, find time and learn. Time and attention are your most precious resources. Invest it into key skills which you can integrate into current projects, not ultra-sophisticated and useless, school-type data. Work in sales? Read the best sales books, listen to podcasts, and sit courses! Use your breaks and holidays. Use your spare time to learn, and your working time to use. Promotions happen not from “experience”, but from skill and performance accumulation over time. Boost that process.

The Bottom Line—Simple ≠ Easy

Can it be that simple? It is. Knowledge won’t come through osmosis. Skills can’t be inhaled. College costs hundreds of thousands of dollars and leaves you with limited real-life value—and a group of friends and poster. Self-education costs mostly time and attention and leaves you with every soft and hard capacity you actually need. Some need formality—I don’t want to be operated on by a self-educated surgeon. Others need flexibility—entrepreneurship and arts suffocate from college. Depends on you.

In the end, formal and informal education have their pros and cons. There’s no right answer. I will end this one with words from a few much smarter than I am. “By seeking and blundering we learn.” - Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. “All I have learned, I learned from books.” - Abraham Lincoln. “If you think education is expensive, try ignorance.” - Robert Orben. “Education is the kindling of a flame, not the filling of a vessel.” - Socrates. “Self-education is, I firmly believe, the only kind of education there is.” - Isaac Asimov.