It’s Time to Rethink Education – Part 3 (The Future of College)

Over the next ten years, I suspect the concept of a college education will be questioned to such an extent, and by so many people, that all assumptions we currently hold dear will be discarded. The spark for this momentous shift will start, as is so often the case, with simple economics. Too many young people have taken on too much debt to get jobs that didn’t require this education they were told they needed. We quite literally have an entire generation that understands this intimately, and this understanding will shape the way they see college, and education in general, as they raise kids of their own.

As I write this, I’m excited to say we live in one of the most extraordinary times in human history. The old way of doing things in virtually every aspect of human civilization has either broken down, or is breaking down as I write this. Communications, media, finance, money itself, etc. The list is seemingly endless, and education is no exception. In fact, I think education is an example of extremely low-hanging fruit and will be disrupted and decentralized in unimaginable ways in the years ahead.

If it was just a function of student debt, the changes in how human education functions going forward wouldn’t be as extreme as I expect. As I mentioned earlier, the problem of widespread debt serfdom is merely a catalyst for the paradigm level change I foresee. As younger generations who grew up with the internet start to question how schooling works, from kindergarten to grad school, it’ll become very apparent how archaic and stifling our current methods really are. I already highlighted many examples of this in Parts 1 and 2, so I’m not going to repeat myself. Today’s post will center around the concept of college, and whether or not people will perceive it as a useful experience in the decades to come. I suspect not.

As it stands today, there are two main reasons everyone thinks you need to go to college. First, many employers (ridiculously) require a college degree to get a job. Second, it’s become a societal norm and rite of passage. There’s tremendous peer pressure to go to college so you’re not the person who gets condescending looks at the party when you sheepishly confess that you didn’t. In other words, we’ve created an irrational expectation for a college degree driven by the desire to attain specific employment and social opportunities. As such, all it will really take to end this ritual of going to college is a society wide mindset shift. These sorts of things can happen, and I fully expect this one will.

One contemporary example of how this sort of thing can take root can be seen in the burgeoning Bitcoin and crypto asset economy. This has been the most lucrative and dynamic spaces to work in over the past couple of years, and no one in it really cares what college you went to, or if you went at all. What matters at the end of the day is talent, and if you’re a talented programer you’ll find your spot. After all, we don’t even know who Satoshi Nakamoto is and it doesn’t matter. What matters is the code and it’s ability to fundamentally change the world. I think this the mindset of the future, where dominator hierarchies are replaced by merit based hierarchies (holarchies).

As Ken Wilber described (this will sound like gibberish unless you’ve read my work around Spiral Dynamics):

That lessening of green’s pervasive hostility and vindictiveness toward all previous stages of development is what we identied as “step one” in the requisite self-healing of green. There is at least a decent likelihood that this will—and to some degree already has—begun to happen. On the other hand, “step two”—the realization that growth holarchies provide the actual basis of the value judgments that green is already making, and that these growth holarchies also are the only truly effective means to displace the dominator hierarchies that green correctly ranks on the bottom of the list of social desirables—is a bit less likely to occur at the green level itself, but will most likely depend upon the transformation to integral 2nd tier. My strong suspicion, therefore, is that green will perform a good deal of step one on its own, and that this will have a very positive effect on culture at large. (And conversely, to the extent that at least this first step is not taken, then the self-corrective drive of evolution will continue to push, and push, and push into existing affairs, driving more Trump-like “disasters” as evolution redoubles its efforts to force its way through these recalcitrant obstructions.)

Many people reading this will say that what’s happening with Bitcoin and crypto assets is just an exception. Others will proclaim that it’s all just a tulip bubble anyway, and things will go back to the way they were after it pops. I completely disagree. Whether Bitcoin conquers the world or not time will tell, but the ethos it represents about the world (decentralization) isn’t going anywhere.

Moreover, as I explained in yesterday’s post, my wife and I are seriously considering unschooling. I’m not just blowing smoke on this, I’m looking at potentially putting my money where my mouth is.

Not only that, but it’s increasingly clear to me that the college experience is in many ways making people dumber. To prove this point, I highly recommend everyone read an extremely important article written by two former professors at Evergreen college, Bret Weinstein and his wife Heather Heying, titled: Bonfire of the Academies: Two Professors on How Leftist Intolerance is Killing Higher Education.

Here are few excerpts:

At colleges and universities all over the country, students are protesting in increasingly virulent and sometimes violent ways. They demand safe spaces and trigger warnings, shouting down those with whom they disagree. It has become rote for outsiders to claim that the inmates are running the asylum; that this is analogous to Mao’s Red Guard, Germany’s brown shirts, the French Revolution’s Jacobins; and, when those being attacked are politically “left” themselves, that the Left is eating its own. These stories seem to validate every fantasy the Right ever had about the Left.

As two professors who recently resigned from positions at a college we loved, and who have always been on the progressive-left end of the political spectrum, we can say that, while none of those characterizations is exactly right, there is truth in each of them…

In 2015, Evergreen hired a new president. Trained as a sociologist, George Bridges did two things upon arrival. First, he hired an old friend to talk one-on-one to members of our community — faculty, staff, and students. We talked about our values and our visions for the college. But the benefit of hindsight suggests that he was looking for something else. He was mapping us, assessing our differences, our blind spots, and the social tensions that ran beneath the surface. Second, Bridges fired the provost, Michael Zimmerman. The provost, usually synonymous with the vice president for academics, is the chief academic officer at an institution of higher education. Zimmerman would have disapproved of what Bridges had in mind and would have had some power to stop it. But he was replaced by a timid (though well-liked) insider who became a pawn due to his compromised interim status and his desire not to make waves.

Having mapped the faculty and fired the provost, Bridges began reworking the college in earnest. Surprise announcements became the norm as opportunities for discussion dwindled.

The president took aim at what made Evergreen unique, such as full-time programs. He fattened the administration, creating expensive vice president positions at an unprecedented rate, while budgets tightened elsewhere due to drops in student enrollment and disappearing state dollars. He went after Evergreen’s unparalleled faculty autonomy, which was essential to the unique teaching done by the best professors.

All of this should have been alarming to a faculty in which professors have traditionally viewed administrative interference in academic matters with great suspicion. But Bridges was strategic and forged an alliance with factions known to be obsessed with race. He draped the “equity” banner around everything he did. Advocating that Evergreen embrace itself as a “College of Social Justice,” he argued that faculty autonomy unjustly puts the focus on teachers rather than students, and that the new VP for Equity and Inclusion would help us serve our underserved populations. But no discussion was allowed of students who did not meet the narrow criteria of being “underserved.” Because of the wrapping, concerns about policy changes were dismissed as “anti-equity.” What was in the nicely wrapped box turned out to be something else entirely.

Imagine being a parent who spent years of savings to send their child to Evergreen. Irate wouldn’t even begin to describe it.

In the decades to come, the people who will increasingly shape our world probably won’t have a college degree at all — and that’s probably a good thing.

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In Liberty,
Michael Krieger

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18 thoughts on “It’s Time to Rethink Education – Part 3 (The Future of College)”

  1. With several decades now behind me since my post-secondary education ended, the two best things I can on its behalf are: (1) it introduced me to new ways of looking at things; and (2) it gave me the tools I needed to be my own teacher and continue learning on my own. Perhaps, if I had been a faster learner, I could have achieved all of this alone and unassisted during that period. But as things were, I must confess that those years of formal education did accelerate the process. However, that all occurred during a different economic era. What I would do now if faced with the decision of whether or not to attend college is anyone’s guess. But I do suspect that whichever way i decided, I’d by all means strive to get a better grounding in a useful variety of practical, hands-on skills than I had then (and do now).

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  2. When I attended university, in the 1960s as undergraduate, then at the start of the 1970s as a grad student, I really tried to make the most of the course work and student paid work to do. It was possible to profit greatly from studies back then, because university was what one made of it. Not now, for all too much. It is the agenda of others who try to determine what one gets out of college, for better (now rarely) or for worse (all too commonly). I am glad that I did all that study and work back then, but it would be a waste in these times.

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  3. What you seem to be saying about “Greens” is that while they have demonstrated the capacity to conceive of a particular ideal of “equity” and project it into their collective mental space as a shared ideology, they haven’t yet developed sufficiently as human beings to translate that ideal into practice as much more than a tool of political self-advantage. Obviously, the “Green” version of this general phenomenon has its own unique flavor (“odor” might be more appropriate in this instance). However, I’m not sure that the general phenomenon isn’t common to all forms of idealism that fail when and where the rubber meets the road, similar to how moralism rarely fails to beget hypocrisy. I won’t even begin to speak of religion in this connection– its secular variants are example enough already.

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  4. Hi Michael,
    Nice posts about the education system and unschooling! I’ve a young kid myself so I find your posts on this subject particularly interesting.

    Here are a 2 quotes, including the links I found them in that might provide some insight in the history of the schooling system in the U.S.
    I found them in the Corbett Report, another great alternative news just like Liberty Blitzkrieg:

    1)
    “We want one class of persons to have a liberal education, and we want another class of persons, a very much larger class, of necessity, in every society, to forego the privileges of a liberal education and fit themselves to perform specific difficult manual tasks.”
    [from Woodrow Wilson years before coming into office as President of the United States, in a lecture on ‘ The meaning of a Liberal Education’]
    link:
    https://www.corbettreport.com/the-answer-to-common-core-alternative-models-of-education/

    and

    2)
    “In our dream, we have limitless resources, and the people yield themselves with perfect docility to our molding hand. The present educational conventions fade from our minds; and, unhampered by tradition, we work our own good will upon a grateful and responsive folk. We shall not try to make these people or any of their children into philosophers or men of learning or science. We are not to raise up from among them authors, orators, poets, or men of letters. We shall not search for embryo great artists, painters, musicians. Nor will we cherish even the humbler ambition to raise up from among them lawyers, doctors, preachers, politicians, statesmen, of whom we now have ample supply.”
    [from Frederick Taylor Gates, John D. Rockefeller’s most trusted philanthropic adviser]
    Although Rockefeller’s resources weren’t exactly limitless, they might as well have been. In 1902 he established the General Education Board to help implement Gates’ vision for the country school of tomorrow with a staggering $180 million endowment.
    The Rockefeller influence on education was felt almost immediately, and it was amplified by help from fellow monopolists of the era, who were approaching the topic of philanthropy from the same angle.
    link:
    https://www.corbettreport.com/episode-310-rise-of-the-oiligarchs/

    Other links you might want to check out on the subject are:
    https://www.corbettreport.com/the-answer-to-common-core-alternative-models-of-education/

    and

    https://www.corbettreport.com/why-common-core-must-be-opposed/

    or just go to the Corbett Report itself and type into the search-option “education” or “school”.

    In any case, keep up your good work!
    Mason

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  5. When I went to university, in the 1960s (with a big break in the middle to work for a few years before returning) and the very start of the 1970s, I recognised (and was able to tell pretty well) that the institutions that I opted for really did offer something worthwhile to make it worth spending the time, and so forth, to obtain the degrees. It was not that I wanted that piece of degree-granting parchment so much that I would close my eyes and go for the education just to have the diploma. The schools that I attended really offered worthwhile courses to form me for my desired profession. I really doubt, with the introduction of so much fluff and bias that have invaded curricula since then that I would make the same decision today. I still would want results (good preparation) not just some useless diploma. I don’t believe now, nor did I back then, that university was worth it for its own sake if it were to become senile, as so largely it has become..

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  6. Why is a college degree important

    ‘First, many employers (ridiculously) require a college degree to get a job.

    Second, it’s become a societal norm and rite of passage.’

    These two reasons can be combined to one reason: the reason you need a college degree is because you simply cannot work without a college degree.

    Being trained in Medicine (with a college degree, etc), I know that all I learned at University and during my specialization, I could have learned in one to two years. However, it took me more than 10 years (which is ‘normal’) to get where I am today and I am still ‘learning’.

    There is a good reason for this: it gives the field of Medicine a monopoly position: you cannot enter unless you submit yourself to endless (often mindnumbing) training combined with long working hours for relatively little money. If you do this long enough and truly (or pretend to) believe that this system works, you may move up to a higher echelon and become an administrator in the field of medicine who sees relatively no students or patients, and does not have to work too hard, and is able to live a luxury, yet useless, life.

    Still, I believe that the time you spent in being trained as a specialist (in medicine for instance) is better invested than investing your time in Bitcoin, which is a trade (or speculation), from which you may become extremely rich, but it certainly does not educate you (unless you lose a Fortune, but I cannot recommend such ‘education’)

    Being trained in Medicine is just another racket, but at least you learn a thing or two while studying it. And the work is good and seeing patients or do research with patients, is really good. But still Medicine is, like any profession for which you need a college degree, a racket imposed to students to guarentee a monopoly.

    Even so, I wouldn’t like to recommend a ‘doctor’ who did not receive the training he received in college and in the hospital. The one to two years of teaching and training that I talked about above are essential, but you only get the chance to learn the profession if you submit yourself to the college system of Medicine. I am sure that also apllies to others professions, I am sorry to say…

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  7. Greetings from the UK Michael. I follow your work via ZH. I wanted to pick up on your ‘unschooling’ comment. We home educate our daughter (now nearly 9) and I couldn’t recommend it more highly – I have watched her absolutely flourish over the last 3 years. Looking down the track, I intend to incentivise her away from university (college) and towards starting a business if I can.

    Sure, there are the usual careers for doctors, engineers etc, but in the UK (just like the US) most kids emerge from university with monstrous debts and limited opportunities for well-paid work. Those that do find work, can’t really afford to pay off their loans and take on mortgages, and on top of this they will probably not be retiring until they are at least 70. On the subject of Bitcoin – I believe it’s the future of money, so it’s likely to open up a whole new field of employment. Bitcoin is also currently providing me with a greater return than 30 years in a government pension scheme – go figure!

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  8. Whew, Willem, I’m glad that I entered a profession where the normal entry (and nearly always sufficient back then) was the Master’s Degree! Librarianship, fortunately, did not have the throat-throttling hold on candidates, keeping them grad-schooled overtime, that medicine, many of the sciences, and some liberal arts subjects do! What a racket some of these graduate programmes have!

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  9. Great set of articles, thay are really challenging my assuptions. On a seperate note Mike, can I just say that I appreciate the community of thoughtful people who comment and add valuable texture to your articles. Zerohedge used to be like that, till something changed about 5 years ago, now its all calling of childish names like, Cucks, Libtards blaming the Jew/Black/”insert your own prejustice here”. There has been a coarsing of discussion, with no space for the other’s thought out position.
    Luckily your site still is an oasis.

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    • With the changes that are simmering away while the foolish faculties and administrators of colleges and universities find new ways to make themselves ever more irrelevant, as I librarian I can only hope that the documentary resources of these failing institutions do not end up destroyed or abandoned. There is a limited ability of libraries and archives outside of academia to take up the slack and to add these resources to what they have already (and to catalogue it all!). Maybe private collections once again will have a prominence that they had in the 17th and 18th centures.

    • Shane, I’m really happy to hear that these articles had that affect on you. That’s exactly what I want, people to start thinking more outside the box and questioning all the assumptions they had before, even if that makes them uncomfortable.

      As far as the comment section, I’m really glad you noticed that and it means a lot to me. A few years ago I realized that I could either make the comment section here a free for all for trolls, bigots and bad actors, or I could focus on building a community of thoughtful people who want to talk to each other, discuss and learn. It’s pretty clear to me, that if you run a website and do not very actively monitor the comment section to make sure terrible people with bad intentions don’t take over and ruin it for everyone else, they will. I’m very pleased about how the comment section/community here has developed as of late, and I’m pleased you noticed.

      Thanks.

  10. More on education (make sure you click on both the Krishnamurti quote and the cartoon:

    http://78.media.tumblr.com/311e132c074c8ea1c2311c86b5cfe33f/tumblr_ozth40jGtB1vsku7uo2_r1_400.jpg

    and this at Epsilon Theory:

    http://epsilontheory.com/clever-hans/

    I think that all students should watch the exponential function lecture by Professor Bartlett and demonstrate that they understand the “one or none” population reality.

    The issue for those students who get homeschooled is where do they go after leaving home. Maybe more importantly, what do they do? Once the veil is lifted, it is difficult to find something in the existing system that is meaningful.

    Michael, Have you read Wilber’s “Boomeritis?”

    Reply
    • “Once the veil is lifted, it is difficult to find something in the existing system that is meaningful.”
      Totally correct, which is why I would expect such kids to displace the system via innovation and creativity.
      Personally, I think the world will be so different by the time my kids get to that age, much of the groundwork for the new paradigm will already be in place, so there will be little need to conform to this sick and twisted society we have today.

      I have not read Boomeritis, but I think I’m pretty familiar with many of the themes in it.

  11. Mike,

    I left college after two weeks when i was 18 years old to join the trades and work with my hands. I was in engineering school at the time. They were trying to teach engineering in a verbal and sequential manner. I didn’t like the way they were teaching it. It made me totally uncomfortable. I thought it should be taught in a different way. It just didn’t fit. I didn’t know why at the time. My parents and society always seemed to try and make me feel guilty. For many years i always felt like an outsider or rebel. It felt like I was doing something bad or wrong. I was smart and they tried to make it look like I was lazy or an under achiever.

    It wasn’t until later when I was in my 40’s that I discovered why. An engineer named Felder and a psychiatrist named Silverman developed a test for 8 different types of intelligence. I found and took the test. I scored very high on visual and global learning styles. This was the total opposite of how they taught engineering back in the 80’s. They taught in a verbal and sequential way. So finally I knew once in for all why I developed my own educational method. I knew why the engineering school felt so uncomfortable. For some the traditional education system will work great but if you are like me it doesn’t work very well at all.
    Here is a link. http://thepeakperformancecenter.com/educational-learning/learning/preferences/learning-styles/felder-silverman/

    I had tremendous technical success in my life. Just check out ComfortableHeat.com or SaveNRG.org to see what I have done. I have outperformed engineers in technical competition. I became a GOAT (Greatest of All Time) in my field. I won “Best in Show” with the highest points total in the history of the competition on a commercial radiant heating project that I submitted my own CAD drawings for. I developed a “World Wide Energy Efficiency Standard” that will revolutionize the way we put up buildings for energy efficiency. That is if the establishment ever decides to listen to me.

    These three articles that you wrote are great and go on to show that our school system is old and outdated and needs to be revamped to take advantage of technical improvements from the internet. Thank you for writing these. I agree with everything you said and I am living proof that you are right.

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  12. Here is the paper that I read later in life. The paper proved what I already knew. Or what I felt in my heart. That the educational system wasn’t working for me and I was better off developing my own style. I went to college in 1983. The paper was written in 1987. So back then the professors did not know that there was a different way to teach or learn. I didn’t read the paper until maybe 2010 or so give or take a few years. I can’t remember. So I had to just figure all of it all on my own and thank god I did that.

    http://www4.ncsu.edu/unity/lockers/users/f/felder/public//Papers/LS-1988.pdf

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  13. As David Graeber points out, if you ignore virtual reality and focus on actual reality the university system has resulted in no significant technological breakthroughs in fifty years. Planes do not fly much faster and according to Graeber the futurists of fifty years ago would be deeply disappointed to see an absence of flying cars, space travel or clean unlimited energy sources.
    Part of the reason for the stunning lack of innovation is that in many areas of academia, innovation is actively suppressed. In social sciences for example if an academic seeks to get published in a peer reviewed journal innovation is suppressed by an insistence that the author only make comments that can be supported by referencing other authors. A process that effectively bans innovation.
    So how are universities doing in terms of providing suitably trained people to work in the economy? The logic here is that the best trained people will result in the best performing companies and the best performing economies. This would mean that it should be expected that in the UK and the US, the countries where Oxford, Cambridge and Harvard are located, there should be signs of economic success that support the conclusion that these are the best universities. However both the US and UK are mired in debt and are struggling to compete with the products they produce. A recent report claimed that since Bush was president 70,000 factories have closed in America.
    While cheaper labour in emerging economies is often cited as the reason for the near collapse of production in the US this answer is problematic. This is because if this answer were true then it would mean that all countries in the developed world would be experiencing mass factory closures. This is not the case and the situation in Germany is the proof of this. The German economy is thriving.
    This raises the question of why Germany is thriving when other western economies are struggling? The answer lies in what occurred in Germany after WW2. At the time there was a determination to take steps so that in the future another Hitler would never be able to come to power. What Germany did was to start teaching critical thinking in schools. The result of this is that today many of the world’s best companies are based in Germany and the German economy is thriving when other western economies are falling behind.

    So why have the rest of the western world not introduced critical thinking into their education systems? The answer was probably best elucidated by Foucault who identified how power’s effectiveness is proportional to its ability to hide its mechanisms. Preventing people being taught how to think critically is a power holding strategy.
    What this means is that Harvard, Oxford and Cambridge universities, while they may have the highest academic standards, are the leading symbols of a failing system of education, which both stifles innovation and actively suppresses critical thinking. Until basic changes are made in these areas universities will continue to fail to achieve their basic objectives.

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