This pretty much speaks for itself:

Our education system, as it stands, from kindergarten through graduate school, is the opposite of resilience, flexibility, and adaptability.  It teaches a narrow set of academic/analytic skills, mostly divorced from the practicalities of life, and drills them into you for hours, days, weeks, months, and years on end.  Analytic skills may be valuable to success in a rapidly changing, chaotic world, but they are far, far from the whole picture.  Success, happiness, contribution, innovation, and leadership depend on a range of human skills, most of which are not taught in school.

(Peter) Thiel says:  “To question formal education in our society – it’s the one thing that’s really taboo in our society.  And if you want to have a candidate for something that’s really a bubble, you need incredible belief.  In the nineties, people really believed in technology.  This last decade, people really believed in housing.  The precondition for a bubble is intense belief without any possibility for questioning it.  Our beliefs about education fall under this category right now.

“I worry that our thinking about education has gotten to be 100 percent outsourced.  People just follow the tracked programs other people tell them to do, without questioning it at all.  I worry that we’ve forgotten how to think for ourselves about education, and we need to recover that.   My number one candidate for a bubble in the United States today is higher education.  It is believed incredibly intensely.  To question it is to put yourself outside the circle of respectable belief.”

-From Education of Millionaires

I will add that Peter Thiel is the guy I wrote about several months ago, who started the Thiel Fellowship, awarding $100,000 each to 20 budding entrepreneurs to “stop out” of school directly and start their own business instead.

I like the last line of the quote, “To question it is to put yourself outside the circle of respectable belief.”

So true.   But since change never comes from the status quo,  being ‘outside’ seems like a good thing.