Is rejecting formal education the new fashion?

I wrote a post on Thoreau's thoughts on learning recently (you can see it here) and I have been thinking about it a lot since.  He questions the role of formal education and makes the case for learning by doing, and teaching yourself.

I am a pretty straight laced sort of person and I like to stick to the rules (even if they are silly), which sometimes winds my (much more free spirited) husband up.  I followed the conventional education route and have worked in steady jobs ever since leaving university.  

Since reading Walden, Thoreau's ideas about learning have been on my mind and, as a consequence, I have noticed some interesting articles that wouldn't have been on my radar otherwise.

One of these was on a blog, zenhabits, which I stumbled across a couple of weeks ago. It is one of the most popular blogs on the internet.  The writer, Leo Babauta, has 6 children and is a proponent of unschooling. He has an entire blog devoted to it, Unschoolery.  He makes the case for self directed learning, but also offers some insights for teachers to help them unschool their regular classroom.

I also followed a link from John Armstrong's website to wired.co.uk which, coincidentally, had a Q&A with Dale Stephens, founder of the Uncollege movement.  Stephens has written a book, called Hacking your Education, which I have also added to my reading list.  The article says Uncollege

"encourages students to be self-directed learners and to create a 'learning community in the real world' that breaks the 'dichotomy between education and life.'"

This has some real parallels with the youtube video I mentioned in my post On Expectations recently, that is, school and life shouldn't feel like two separate worlds.

Is the point of education having the certificate at the end of it or the knowledge? Or is the knowledge enough?

Status Anxiety and its solutions

I've finished reading Status Anxiety by Alain de Botton. In his "solutions" section he puts forward some interesting ideas we can draw on to counter status anxiety and feeling bad about our position in society or how we think other people view us.

He groups them into big themes: Philosophy, Art, Politics, Religion and Bohemia.

In Philosophy, he talks about some of the philosophers in history who argued that the rest of society is stupid / ill informed / wrong and therefore we should dismiss and ignore other people's opinions of us.  He goes on to state that the obvious result of this sort of attitude is that one will likely end up with no friends. Hmm, doesn't sound very appealing.

Next he talks about Art - specifically novels, painting, tragedy and comedy.  He points out that novels have the ability to show us the moral good in people who would, if only based on their lack of outward symbols of status like wealth or power, be regarded by others as unimportant.  He says in life we only give praise to moral goodness that is outwardly displayed, but in novels we can listen in to the characters' thoughts and eavesdrop on conversations, which can give us a different perspective on them and make us appreciate their deeper qualities. In making his arguments he makes references the implicit social commentary in Jane Austen's Mansfield Park and George Eliot's Middlemarch. I liked this idea and it reminded me that novels can teach us a lot about life, it doesn't always have to be through non-fiction. I haven't read either of these books so I'm adding them to my list.

The rest of the Art section didn't really strike a chord with me, but the Politics section made up for it. He starts by talking about what "status" meant in different societies through history and found that it was sometimes contradictory, and ever changing. In 2004 when the book was written he said that high status meant:

"[someone who has] been able to accumulate money, power and renown through his or her own accomplishments (rather than through inheritance) in one of the myriad sectors of the commercial world (including sport, art and scientific research)."

He talks later about our pursuit of material things, and how advertisers sell us things like cars:

"...[the advert will] fail to mention our tendency to cease to be excited by anything after we have owned it for a short while...We are tempted to believe that certain achievements and possessions will give us enduring satisfaction...Life seems to be a process of replacing one anxiety with another and substituting one desire for another...The new car will be rapidly absorbed, like all the other wonders we already own, into the material backdrop of our lives, where we will hardly register its existence..."

This section made me think a lot, particularly the lines quoted above. I mentioned it to my husband and we had a good chat about our different buying styles, and which of our possessions give us pleasure beyond the initial rush of buying them.  I think this will probably deserve a separate blog post on its own...

The other part that I liked in the politics section was his recounting of a scene from Virginia Woolf's A Room of One's Own.  Woolf is denied entry into Trinity College Library at Cambridge University because she is a woman (she was told she could only enter if accompanied by a Fellow of the College or if she had a letter of introduction).  Instead of thinking "what's wrong with me?" she thought "what's wrong with them?".  After this she came up with a set of political demands for women, which included "a room of one's own".  I've never read this book, but that was my university library so it caught my imagination - I know that as a naive 18 year old I took it completely for granted that I could come and go as I pleased.

The remaining sections of the book cover Religion (where he reminds us that in the end we're all going to die so status anxiety is a bit pointless) and Bohemia, where he pointed out that there are groups of people who choose to forgo status giving activities and possessions, and he talked about Henry David Thoreau and his time at Walden Pond as an example.  

So...to wrap up, I liked this book and definitely had a different perspective reading it now than when it was first published.  Even so, the quote about status in Roman Krznaric's book is still my favourite on the topic and had the most impact on me and how I think about status. So punchy, so simple and so true.

Thoreau on learning

The third instalment of the Walden Pond posts picks up on some of Thoreau's comments on learning and formal education. These comments are so relevant now.

On the costs of formal education:

"Those things for which the most money is demanded are never the things which the student most wants. Tuition, for instance, is an important item in the term bill, while for the far more valuable education which he gets by associating with the most cultivated of his contemporaries no charge is made."

On formal education vs. learning by doing:

"If I wished a boy to know something about the arts and science, for instance, I would not pursue the common course, which is merely to send him into the neighbourhood of some professor, where anything is professed and practised but the art of life...Which would have advanced the most at the end of a month - the boy who had made his own jackknife from the ore which he had dug and smelted, reading as much as would be necessary for this - or the boy who had attended the lectures on metallurgy at the Institute in the meanwhile, and received a Rodgers' penknife from his father? Which would be most likely to cut his fingers?"

On lifelong learning:

"It is time that we had uncommon schools, that we did not leave off our education when we begin to be men and women.  It is time that villages were universities, and their elder inhabitants the fellows of universities, with leisure - if they are indeed, so well off - to pursue liberal studies the rest of their lives. Shall the world be confined to one Paris or one Oxford forever? Cannot students be boarded here and get a liberal education under the skies of Concord?"

I love these.

Thoreau on news

As I said yesterday, I've been reading Walden Pond by Henry David Thoreau and he is talking about anything and everything - nature ("I rejoice that there are owls" - this made me laugh), civilisation, institutions, learning, health, appearance, money, freedom, work, relationships, philosophy, religion and the list goes on. This is the latest instalment in the Walden Pond posts...

Thoreau on news:

"I am sure that I never read any memorable news in a newspaper.  If we read of one man robbed, or murdered, or killed by accident, or one house burned, or one vessel wrecked, or one steamboat blown up, or one cow run over on the Western Railroad, or one mad dog killed, or one lot of grasshoppers in the winter - we never need read of another. One is enough. If you are acquainted with the principle, what do you care for a myriad instances and applications?" 

How true.  Also, see how all his examples of "news" were negative things? It reminded me of something Philippa Perry says in "How to Stay Sane" about how we should limit our exposure to the TV (including the news).  She says:

"...even the news appears to be filtered for maximum emotional shock value, which means it has a bias towards bad news rather than good.  Be careful which stories you expose yourself to.  I'm not saying it is not important to be informed about what is going on, but to be informed repeatedly about bad news will give us neither a balanced view of our world nor of the other people who inhabit it."

I think Thoreau was onto something.

Wading through Walden Pond

I have been reading Walden this week by Henry David Thoreau.  It's something I thought I should read given the number of other books that have referenced him and his ideas.  He's quoted all over the place.  This book was written in the 19th century and is about the author's experience of living away from civilisation in a house he built himself at Walden Pond, when he maintained himself for 2 years without any formal "job".

There are some brilliant flashes of wisdom and funny observations, much of which are still relevant today, but the bits in between aren't so engaging and I've found my mind wandering off (which is why it's taking me ages to read...).  That said, I thought I'd take stock now by sharing some of the highlights for me so far.

On what we wear (and why we bother wasting money on more clothes than we need):

"No man ever stood the lower in my estimation for having a patch in his clothes; yet I am sure that there is greater anxiety, commonly, to have fashionable, or at least clean and unpatched clothes, than to have a sound conscience." 

"It is an interesting question how far men would retain their relative rank if they were divested of their clothes."     

"I say, beware of all enterprises that require new clothes, and not rather a new wearer of clothes." 

"Every generation laughs at the old fashions, but follows religiously the new."

On housing (and keeping up with the Joneses):

"Most men appear never to have considered what a house is, and are actually needlessly poor all their lives because they think that they must have such a one as their neighbours have."

On luxury rail travel (he sounds unimpressed with the railways throughout the book to be honest):

"I would rather sit on a pumpkin and have it all to myself than be crowded on a velvet cushion."

Later he says:

"If we do not get out sleepers, forge rails, and devote days and nights to work, but go on tinkering upon our lives to improve them, who will build railroads? ... But if we stay at home and mind our business, who will want railroads? We do not ride on the railroad; it rides upon us."

On avoiding life's complications:

"Our life is frittered away by detail...Simplicity, simplicity, simplicity! I say, let your affairs be two or three, and not a hundred or a thousand; instead of a million count half a dozen, and keep your accounts on your thumb-nail."

He would have enjoyed the internet:

"If we live in the Nineteenth Century, why should we not enjoy the advantages which the Nineteenth Century offers? Why should our life be in any respect provincial? If we will read newspapers, why not skip the gossip of Boston and take the best newspaper in the world at once?"

Anyway, back to wading for me.