Don´t go back to school

8/13/2019 Dont go back to school

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labors of love

Dont Go Back to School: How to Fuel the

Internal Engine of LearningbyMaria Popova

When you step away from the prepackaged structure of

traditional education, youll discover that there are many

more ways to learn outside school than within.

The present education system is the trampling of the

herd,legendary architect Frank Lloyd Wright

lamented in 1956. Half a century later, I startedBrain

Pickingsin large part out of frustration and

disappointment with my trampling experience of our

culturally fetishized Ivy League education. I found

myself intellectually and creatively unstimulated by

the industrialized model of the large lecture hall, the

PowerPoint presentations, the standardized tests

assessing my rote memorization of facts rather than

my ability to transmute that factual knowledge into a

pattern-recognition mechanism that connects different

disciplines to cultivate wisdom about how the world

works and a moral lens on how it shouldwork. So

Brain Pickingsbecame the record of my alternative learning, of that cross-disciplinary

curiosity that took me from art to psychology to history to science, by way of the myriad

pieces of knowledge I discovered and connected on my own. I didnt live up to the

entrepreneurial ideal of the college drop-out and begrudgingly graduated with honors,

but refused to go to my own graduation and decided never to go back to school. Years

later, Ive learned more in the course of writing and researching the thousands of articles

to date than in all the years of my formal education combined.

So, in 2012, when I found out that writer Kio Starkwas crowdfunding a book that would

serve as a manifesto for learning outside formal education, I eagerly chipped in. Now,

Dont Go Back to School: A Handbook for Learning Anythingis out and is everything

I couldve wished for when I was in college, an essential piece of cultural literacy, at

once tantalizing and practically grounded assurance that success doesnt lie at the end of

a single highway but is sprinkled along a thousand alternative paths. Stark describes it as

a radical project, the opposite of reform not about fixing school [but] about

transforming learning and making traditional school one among many options rather

than the only option. Through a series of interviews with independent learners who

have reached success and happiness in fields as diverse as journalism, illustration, and

molecular biology, Stark who herself dropped out of a graduate program at Yale,

despite being offered a prestigious fellowship cracks open the secret to defining your

own successand finding your purposeoutside the factory model of formal education.

She notes the patterns that emerge:

People who forgo school build their own infrastructures. They create and borrow

and reinvent the best that formal schooling has to offer, and they leave the worst

behind. That buys them the freedom to learn on their own terms.

[]

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Don´t go back to school

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