“9 Dangerous Things” to “Better Than College”

There were a lot of great blogs and articles this week on learning & education, so I thought the best thing I could do tonight is share them with you.   They are all worth a few minutes of your time.  My favorite of the bunch without question is this Forbes.com article by Jessica Hagy entitled, “9 Dangerous Things You Were Taught in School”.   I want to embroider these 9 things on pillows & hand them out as gifts.  Read them. Every day.

Next up is Kenneth Danford – co-founder of the North Star school for self-directed teens – & his article “Stop Racing! Start Living! (It works!)  in which he talks about the merits of homeschooling and self-directed learning.

Lisa Nielsen of the Innovative Educator is one of my new heroes.  This woman is fearless, taking on the Dept. of Education (her employer!) and challenging the current climate of testing at every opportunity.  She runs Opt-Out NY for parents of schooled children who don’t want to subject their kids to testing.   She champions unschooling & homeschooling.   She is, to put it mildly, amazing.  On her blog this week she lists The Hottest Posts that Everyone’s Talking About, and I guarantee you’ll find them interesting.

Then, filed under “Insanity” we have two articles from the Daily Beast – the first of which is “The 13 Most Useless Majors” and the second is – yes, you guessed it – “The 13 Most Useful College Majors”.    Everything in which I’ve ever had an interest fell into the Beast’s “useless” category.  Hey, there’s an ego builder for you!  All your interests are USELESS.   My favorite thing from these articles came by way of the comments, in which one wise person said, “It’s useful to major in Fine Art if you want to be an artist. It’s useless to major in Nursing if you don’t want to be a nurse.”     Yes, exactly.

Filed firmly under “Sanity” is this article from David Blake titled “Jailbreaking the Degree” in which he postulates that current and future technology with to for the 4 year degree what iTunes did to the album – instead of buying the whole thing people will just buy the songs (or courses) they like & are interested in.  Taking ONLY classes in which you have an interest?  How very unschool-ish.

Finally, we are only weeks away from the release of Blake Boles’ new book, “Better Than College: How to Build a Successful Life Without a 4 Year Degree”, from which you can find an excerpt here.   I was fortunate enough to receive an advanced copy of BTC, and despite my aversion to “Required Reading”, if I could make everyone read Blake’s book, I would.  It is such a well-written and inspiring ‘how to’ guide for a fulfilling life that I started taking notes in relation to things I want to do.

To sum up, life is too short to waste time following other people’s dreams for us.  Time to start following our own.

One comment on ““9 Dangerous Things” to “Better Than College”

  1. Blake says:

    Great links Amy!

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