An argument against conventional schooling
I love education, but I hate schooling.
I don’t necessarily hate schooling for what it did to me, as I escaped it with minimal damage. In fact, in some ways, I benefited from schooling, but my benefit came at the expense of others. And that is one of the reasons why I hate schooling.
I come from a family where schooling is valued aspirationally, but accomplishment has always proven elusive. As of my senior year of high school, no one in my immediate family had graduated from high school, and to my knowledge no one in my extended family had ever attended college.
In part because my family did not care what type of grades I earned, I never cared much myself. I would study for tests in the hallway before class, but I was not going to burn myself out when I had more serious concerns such as wishing girls liked me or hoping that I’d become a starter on the football team. I wanted to do well at school, but not enough that it ever weighed on me.
When the topic of college came up, my dad told me that the only way I could afford to go was if I got a full ride. And because I did not have straight A’s, it felt like I was too late in the game to do that. However, at the end of my junior year a teacher informed me that federal service academies were free to attend (in exchange for a military commitment). I decided I would apply to the U.S. Military Academy at West Point. When I learned that I needed to be near the top of my class to have a shot at getting in, I suddenly became concerned about my class ranking.
For the first time I saw academic success as a competitive, relative measure. I could only do well if I left others, my classmates, behind. It would be many more years before I would fully realize that schooling is a sorting mechanism that provides access and opportunity to some, and denies it to most others.
The sorting mechanism of schooling is great if you win, like I did, I suppose. It is not so great if you got sorted out, like the rest of my family did, though.
In a competition, for every winner there has to be at least one loser. Without losers there can be no winners. But in the game of schooling, being a winner requires many losers. The quality of winning in schoolish pursuits is defined by the number of those who lost (e.g., valedictorian of a large class, admission into a college with a low admission rate). And while schools want to take credit for their winners, they don’t like to take credit for the losers.
“Competition is for losers” is a mantra of Peter Thiel, the complicated investor who could easily be the poster child for “The Worst Person You Know Just Made A Great Point.” This mantra is central to his advice to entrepreneurs to seek out monopoly positions in his book Zero to One. Thiel argues that it is easier to be successful by avoiding competition than by trying to outcompete others. He writes, “All happy companies are different: each one earns a monopoly by solving a unique problem. All failed companies are the same: they failed to escape competition.” This logic applies to school-age people, as well.
The reality is that without schooling, the losers–each of whom is a human being who wants to lead a meaningful life–would not be labeled as losers. The competition of schooling takes brilliant people with unlimited potential and declares that they are inadequate, curtailing future opportunities, and leading too many of them to conclude that perhaps they really are losers.
Our educational system both drives and reflects our obsession with competition. Grades themselves allow precise measurement of each student’s competitiveness; pupils with the highest marks receive status and credentials. We teach every young person the same subjects in mostly the same ways, irrespective of individual talents and preferences. Students who don’t learn best by sitting still at a desk are made to feel somehow inferior.
Peter Thiel, Zero to One
And the winners are not immune from the consequences of competition, they are harmed, too.
Children who excel on conventional measures like tests and assignments end up defining their identities in terms of this weirdly contrived academic parallel reality.
And it gets worse as students ascend to higher levels of the tournament. Elite students climb confidently until they reach a level of competition sufficiently intense to beat their dreams out of them. Higher education is the place where people who had big plans in high school get stuck in fierce rivalries with equally smart peers over conventional careers like management consulting and investment banking. For the privilege of being turned into conformists, students (or their families) pay hundreds of thousands of dollars in skyrocketing tuition that continues to outpace inflation.
Peter Thiel, Zero to One
The good news is that schooling is optional, at least in the United States and select other countries. Through homeschooling, unschooling, or radical alternative learning communities, young people can opt out of the unnecessary and harmful competition of schooling much easier than an entrepreneur can opt out of a competitive marketplace. And one of the greatest benefits of opting out of the competition of schooling is how much space that opens up for education to happen.