EMBRACE AUTODIDACTICISM AND DROP SCHOOL

EMBRACE AUTODIDACTICISM AND DROP SCHOOL

A review of "The Case Against Education" by Bryan Caplan (Click here for a sneak peek)

I know it is kind of weird that a person like me, with more than six years of university studies, affirm that pursuing further studies is a complete waste of time and money, but this is exactly how I feel these days, and I think that for the very first time in my life I am completely sure about something. Most people should not go to university, and even for very good students, attending postgraduate school can end up being worthless. I am not against people who feel studying give them some kind of sense to their lives and valuable personal pursuit. I am just against those people who go to university and decide to take a course of studies because they see everyone else is doing the same. What is the point of going to university if you do not feel it is even the place where you are supposed to be? If by the end you will not get much of it? In addition, what if I told you that I am not the only person who feels that way. Professor Bryan Caplan believes that we should carefully re-evaluate the role of the university. He actually goes beyond and decides to go after high school as well. After all, there was so much content in school that we have not used since those days, and which did not prepare you in any way to post-graduate life.

In "The Case Against Education", Caplan states that we should be better off if we just had less of it. Most of the material that is considered important to instruct in high school and the university is completely useless and does not provide any valuable skills to the workers of the United States. I say the United States because Caplan analyses the case he is most familiar with, which is the education system in North America, taking advantage of his position as an economics professor. Defenders of humanities might argue that university was never thought to be a way of providing students with the skills they might be required in order to do a job, but we have to make sure that in the modern world, where lots of people seem to be rushing to college to get a degree in anything, (How many degrees are offered by universities these days, anyway?) the value of a college diploma has fallen deeply and we seem to have lost the high standards that were required of any student, to be granted their degree.

I am an English language instructor at a university in Bogotá, and I have been an eyewitness of these phenomena. Classrooms are packed with unmotivated students who are eternally bored and do not see a point in anything. Whenever I have a frank chat with them, I notice that most of them have no idea about what they want for their lives. They just enter a university because that was what was expected. Finish school, go to college, pay prohibitive amounts of money to get a piece of paper that says that you may be qualified for a job you will have no idea about how to do until you start doing it. I think I am not exactly against education though, but against the schooling system itself, and the way it has turned into another gold digger for the big capitalist.

Caplan believes that most of us would be better off if subsidies for education were completely dismounted and we encouraged a big percentage of the population to go to a vocational school. After all, only a small percentage of the population will really use what they are being taught in the classrooms these days.  He believes that there is an excessive emphasis in intellectualism in most university courses and that the whole concept of attending school for another three or four extra years (in Colombia it can even be five) is a waste of money and time. I think the same way. Don't misunderstand me. I believe in education. I believe that it can actually liberate you or at least it can turn you into a smarter person. However, I also believe that just two out of ten people (this figure can actually be smaller) are college material, and even these highly intelligent people might not get much out of post-graduate training. Knowledge is no longer out of your reach. There is a wide range of resources on the web and in public libraries. You no longer need to pay abusive amounts of money to learn something you feel passionate about. I embrace Caplan's view on the case against formal education, but at the same time, I celebrate the freedom to be an autodidact and make the most out of the rich access to the information we have got these days. I invite everyone to use the web to do more useful things than just checking social networks. Learning what you never learnt in school and focusing on your passions can be a positive step towards that kind of education you have been chasing since that very first moment you decided you needed more education, but less school.