#self-directed learning

There are many more things that are possible in nature than you will find written down in books. However, you will only discover this if you are ready to fail and you are ready to learn.

My early interest in plants and the natural world was very apparent to my parents, and they nurtured it gently by simply allowing me to do what I loved doing. There was no song and dance made about it, just the act of creating a space in which I could pursue my interest.

If you’re an intelligent human being and you don’t have meaningful work, then you’d better find it because your death, in those spooky terms, is stalking you every day.

I’m completely library educated. I’ve never been to college. I went down to the library when I was in grade school in Waukegan, and in high school in Los Angeles, and spent long days every summer in the library. I used to steal magazines from a store on Genesee Street, in Waukegan, and read them and then steal them back on the racks again. That way I took the print off with my eyeballs and stayed honest. I didn’t want to be a permanent thief, and I was very careful to wash my hands before I read them. But with the library, it’s like catnip, I suppose: you begin to run in circles because there’s so much to look at and read. And it’s far more fun than going to school, simply because you make up your own list and you don’t have to listen to anyone. When I would see some of the books my kids were forced to bring home and read by some of their teachers, and were graded on — well, what if you don’t like those books? I am a librarian. I discovered me in the library. I went to find me in the library. Before I fell in love with libraries, I was just a six-year-old boy. The library fueled all of my curiosities, from dinosaurs to ancient Egypt. When I graduated from high school in 1938, I began going to the library three nights a week. I did this every week for almost ten years and finally, in 1947, around the time I got married, I figured I was done. So I graduated from the library when I was twenty-seven. I discovered that the library is the real school.

The conventional wisdom says that the specifics of what you learn are much less important than the fact that you’re learning the fundamentals, and you’re learning to learn — things you’ll need to maintain your skills and knowledge in a quickly changing world. The problem is, you virtually never hear a student say that. It’s always the parents or someone speaking on behalf of the educational system. When was the last time you honestly heard (and believed) an actual current college student claim that the true benefit of their formal college education is in learning to be a lifelong learner? That’s just bullsh*t. With very few exceptions, college in the US is more about drinking than it is about deep learning. Others claim that the benefit of a college degree is really more about socialization and independence. I’ve heard reasonably smart adults say, with all sincerity, that spending $80,000 so little Suzy could learn to live on her own was worth it. I think there are a thousand different, and often better, ways to achieve that. Suzy could join the Peace Corps, for example, or go on one of those ‘learning vacations’ where you do an archealogical dig. Hell, just a three-month long trip through Europe with a couple friends and a rail pass (or, as a friend of mine did, a bike trip across Turkey) is certainly going to do more for socialization and independence than a traditional college environment, and at a tiny fraction of the cost.

Everything I hear about is whether a kid — male or female — should pursue this field or that field, what the long-term career prospects are, etc. I almost never hear much discussion about whether it matters if they have a passion for. It’s true that sometimes college is the best way for them to discover their passion, but I’ve seen way too many young people traumatized by the thought of telling their parents that after three years of pre-med, they’re switching to something like… ornamental horticulture (a big area of study at my alma mater, Cal Poly SLO). …Vegetarian cooking is [my daughter’s] passion. She believes in it, she loves it, she takes great pleasure in it. She evangelizes it to others. What horrifies me is that even though I knew she felt this way, it never occurred to me that this was something she might consider instead of college. But she got me with this one: ‘Mom, your degree was exercise physiology. You spent your first five years out of college as a glorified aerobic instructor. Then you taught yourself programming, took a few night classes at UCLA, and made a huge career switch into computers, and found you loved it. You have your own computer book series. Yet you told me you had just a single computer class in college, and you hated it. So… tell me again why college was so great for you?’ And then the kicker: ‘I have no idea if I’ll ever open a restaurant or develop this into a professional career, but whatever investment I make in this will serve me and make me happy for the rest of my life. I’ll be using what I learn here in my personal life, almost every day, regardless of my career. How many people can say that about 90% of what they learned in college?’ The part I still have to get over is that feeling of a missed opportunity. Of unfulfilled potential (too many Microsoft ads?). This was a straight-A kid. One far brighter at 12 than I’ll ever be. One of those about whom people say, ‘She could succeed at anything she wants.’ yet what we all secretly meant was, ‘She could succeed at anything we think she should want.’ Lucky for her, she learned at a much earlier age that passion matters. That money is far less important than joy (and that money doesn’t buy joy). And that whatever decision she makes now, does not determine the rest of her life. She understands that the chances of anyone having a single career for life — or even a decade — are asymptotically approaching zero. And that nothing — not finances (or lack of) or gender or age — will stand in her way if she decides to learn something. And if what she wants to learn at some point in the future is best studied in a formal higher education environment, there’s nothing to stop her from going to college then.