Sixteen years ago, fresh out of high school, I remember forking over $3,800 to take a Carlton Sheets real estate coaching program. I desperately wanted to learn about buying real estate in order to make a living without going to college. Just months out of high school, at age 18, I bought my first rental property. However, it had nothing to do with the Carlton Sheets coaching program. Well, at least not the expensive portion I bought. The real value that helped me was a $99 packet of DVDs that was included. Through these videos and my own actions, I was able to acquire over a million dollars in real estate by age 22 with very little money.
At age 19, I took my one and only college class, “Real Estate Principles”, where I sat in a room with a hundred other kids and listened to dozens of lectures by our instructor. This will always go down as the biggest waste of time in my adult life.
For today’s kids, this type of education is an even greater misallocation of time and capital, because the unconventional means of education is 50x more efficient than it was fifteen years ago. And the best part: it usually costs you nothing.
Fifteen years ago, I could have purchased a DVD to learn real estate principles in a matter of 8 hours. Today’s kids can do the same, only they won’t even have to buy a DVD. Instead, they can simply watch a series of YouTube videos.
Education in a college classroom is a lot like a $200,000 Hillary Clinton speech… what could she or your professor teach you that you can’t easily pick up on the Internet for free?
Or what about those one to three thousand dollar investment conferences? My goodness, the same speakers have hundreds of videos on the Internet.
Besides YouTube, you also have iTunes, and think of all the blogs available to us. The best thinkers in the world are all sharing their information and research for free. And for the most part, unless they are famous, all are very reachable via email or Twitter. I’ve emailed and spoken to three billionaires in the past week! Jim Rogers, Eric Sprott and Carlo Civelli… they don’t know me, but do respond to emails.
Udemy.com and Learnable.com can help you learn real-world skills for 50 bucks. Forget about four years and $30,000 of debt. With the way technology and information sharing is becoming easier and easier for all of us, college classrooms for most people are becoming obsolete.
Technology is making education more efficient, yet there are still millions willing to get in debt to spend years and years in a classroom, when at the click of a mouse, they have an entire world of information just waiting for them. All they have to do is let go of the idea that their education comes through structured (and expensive) academia.
Given the incredibly rapid pace of technological advancement, one has to wonder if a student who enters college in 2015 will even have a relevant degree in 2019.
There are companies today who in a few years will be introducing body scans that can predict diseases that you won’t have for years. In a decade, most of us won’t even be driving our own vehicles. Driverless vehicles will reduce traffic, collapse the price of auto insurance, and make all of our lives safer and more efficient. Entire industries will be radically changed through the creative destruction process.
As a parent of three children between 11 months and 5 years, these are some of the things I think about today. I am thinking about what the world will look like for three adults in 2032.
I have no idea what the world will look like, but I do know it won’t reflect the demands of today. Employment, business, and education will all look much different. The U.S. itself, and the current monetary system we’ve lived under for the past 60 years, will have likely changed as well. With the rise of digital currencies and an entire continent (Asia) currently decoupling itself from western rule, big changes are coming.
The conventional way to raise your kids at this moment in time is treacherous, in my opinion — specifically with regards to their education.
Ultimately, a child will need to emerge as their own person, separate from you and free to pursue their own interests. Being able to learn independently could be a huge advantage. Yet if you look at what is accepted as normal parenting today, I think we overly encourage reliance on schools to teach our children. In my opinion, children should be encouraged to learn from experience. Experts, teachers, and instructors are all important when it comes to refining your education and experience, but the traditional idea that learning comes through academics appears to be little more than statist dogma.
Teaching a child the basics; to read well, speak well, and write well, will give them the liberty to self-teach.
Problem-solving skills, learned from play time and the pursuit of your own interests, are all one in the same. Talk to any successful person, and they will tell you they love what they do. Conventional parenting has separated the two; self-interest and play time are at home, and learning is at school. The source of education is not school, it’s in the way you interpret and learn from experience using what’s between your left and right ear.
– Daniel Ameduri aka The Dissident Dad
For more info see this author’s bio.
This is an excellent piece. I hope it receives the attention it deserves.
I had to think long and hard about what college taught me. The only two things of value were that it convinced me that I was good enough and that it allowed me to meet other like minded people who helped me along on my path. Of course the same might have been true if I had attended a Takwondo class or spent time in a community garden. The separation between work and play, learning and play is really unnatural and unnecessary. My daughters both ask questions about everything they see. They’re trying to keep this system propped up through regulations, but I think the cat’s out of the bag. A million dynamic situations come up that require critical thinking and problem solving skills. Always better to teach children how to think, not what to think.
Great article. Thank you very much for writing it! I was just listening to some interesting research this morning: it was suggesting in the not-too-distant future over 50% of us will be freelance entrepreneurs… Self-education will be a requirement for many.