A college degree was purposed as a receipt for having achieved a set of academically outlined goals that are generally recognized by professionals in a respective field of study. It thrives when the government desires to improve the economic output of its country by educating the people. With the advent of the internet and the accompanying social evolution of the tech generation, however, it is natural to challenge the established order of pedagogy so that its methods can adapt along with these changes.

A student is inherently studious and motivated by his/her own desire to learn. This desire to discover the world is irrespective of age and stage of cognitive development. Society has the power to heavily influence how this internal energy is channeled into a quality education, which is largely independent of any professorial accreditation. Pedagogy holds certain assumptions about how people perceive information and develop understanding from it. The speed with which tech has developed in recent times, has forced theorists to abandon certain individual assumptions about the manner of pedagogy and search for a higher abstraction of the learning process that can be extended to any medium/method/era. Fortunately, human psychology evolves with lag with respect to the accompanying shift in technology. Therefore, it is safer to assume principles governing the behavior of the general student in any state of tech, who is openly poised to engage in the process of learning in some technologically undefined form, rather than to assume how technology will affect their cognitive development.

If we maintain an abstraction about who and under what conditions the student exists, we may begin to see a picture of pedagogy that has not yet been accurately drawn. The student must be shown the value of an education and then (s)he must be led to believe that that value is worth investing time and effort into the required process of acquiring the education. We must defend the argument that a child (as students are associated with questionable youth) is able to reason logically enough to be able to go through the above sequence to experience successful learning. If we can agree that this is true, then this process may be extended to minds that suffer from handicaps and other ailments. We can then begin to see that pedagogy in this light encompasses many possible case students. One might even be audacious enough to relax the definition of student to include the rest of the animal kingdom. Regardless of the student definition, the ROI must be high enough in the eyes of the student in order for a serious commitment to be made. Whether that ROI manifests itself as a good grade to show mom and dad for an ice cream or as the ability to prove one’s alpha status in a pack of fellow wolves, the drive to learn requires it.

I’ve wanted to learn with the ability that I have developed to learn. I never took action until quite recently. I began with MIT’s open courseware on python, it was very thorough but too intense and in-depth for someone without any background, therefore I went to codecademy and followed the python track. I began to develop a feel for the language, but then sought out context for the language by pursuing computer science courses on Udacity that employed python language in order to fully grasp the scope of the language and its utility. I was exposed to the fundamentals of why fiddling with an abstracted high-level language allows an individual to accomplish much more with less code. I began to build a web crawler and got lost in some mathematically complex set and number theories, but the stumbling is part of the process. My journey has been parsed by my own making, and that is something that I learned on my own. College made me realize that the system of education that society has setup for us is upside down. The blanket hierarchical structure for “mastering a subject” has been established by academic professionals whose work is becoming obsolete with the tenure that lulls them into apathetic complacency.

The leaders and pioneers of tomorrow should not be taking notes from these individuals, they should be lecturing to the loitering and the irrelevant. Now this may come as irreverent and borderline insolent, but consider how the world would look if those we call students (the evolutionarily more refined generation) were to express their unadulterated thoughts about the world in which they found themselves to the “experts” in their world. There could be serious benefit for these students in inspiring teachers to question everything they’ve come to rely on in their careers as indisputably reasonable fact. The humility and introspection with which professors would need to carefully reconstruct their perception of the world would become the supreme pedagogical experience for students. It would be in those moments of doubt, that the students would begin to appreciate the value of an education, to see it as something able to grow with them as a companion into the unknown.

Unfortunately, the society in which we sit currently values a piece of paper above the integrity of genuinely progressive ideas. We have collectively built a fiat system of education where the currency is exchanged in graduated diplomas instead of grand ideas and novel gestures of genius. It is time we call into question our ways. Even though society has inherited a broken system, it does not mean that we have to carry that system on as if it were a debt we owed to those who implemented it.

The collegiate network is evolving into an extensive host of resources rolled-up into a packaged price for matriculated students. Pay tuition, with a part-time job or financial aid, and you get access to extremely discounted resources for conceiving and destroying ideas while feeling free to dance around campus, drinking heavily without fear of tomorrow, pulling all-nighters with confident resilience of youth (you get those last two with or without paying tuition). Students are now being given access to every possible tool that they could need to start the next Google or Facebook, the next IBM or Microsoft, the next Tesla Motors or SpaceX. The biggest problem, ironically, is the educational system that is imposed upon students upon their arrival. The greatest obstacle preventing students from maximizing their potential at these universities is the very thing that they claim to be attending these institutions for.

How is this possible? Sociological pressures. The media, the politics, the aging generation, religion, the art, the fabric of society, they all play a role in determining the expectations that we all have of a university education. Painstaking hours sat drowning in halls with wildly uninspiring lectures from disjointed academics who have hardened their views on what is, isn’t, or could ever be. Assignments that compliment the lectures with an equally dull investment of time and effort required for little to no yield in intellectual gain. The birth of agencies such as Tutoring Zone and Study Edge have become the bane of an aching professorial pedagogy. These businesses have responded to a “need to pass” that should have been made irrelevant by the institutionalized educational system itself. Now students are partying, performing the bare minimum to survive the system, and moving on from school to become shifting numbers on corporate payroll excel spreadsheets. The innovation is being bled out from the youth before they even get a chance to learn how to dismantle the system. There is a level of rebel libertarianism that is required to break free from the shackles of establishment.

I used to be the eager and anxious student who wanted to progress in society to “rise to the top” wherever that meant I had to go. I did engineering because it was the path of most suffering and was a sacred diploma to carry in today’s society. My nervous and untamed energy was fed into a system that rejects awkwardness and nonlinear thinking. I was forced to contort my mind into conformation for fear of existing outside the confines of societal benediction. I had to suffocate the innocence in my spirit in order to pass exams. I had to renounce my faith in the impossible in order to ease the nerves of professors and graduate to the next level of decrepitude. I went to college to be inspired to change the world, and instead was persuaded to keep my head down in the appendix of my chemical safety reference. I was beaten to near apathy by the time I walked across the stage wearing a weird ass robe and hat to shake the hands of whoever the fuck those people were. Why do I want this picture with them, again? Oh yea. To post it on Facebook and tag myself in it. Like. Check one off for fitting in!

I was driven to surrender all dignity and creative authority to the educational system. It killed me and everyone else on that stage with me, before me, and forever after me if the system does not respond to the reality of what passes for education these days. The collection of information and skills, upon which we have built pedigrees of qualification, and is represented by the rushed ink of a certified diploma with unwarranted signatures, has lost all value. We pride ourselves in getting through the system when we hang that diploma up on our walls, when we should feel ashamed for not having fundamentally affected the system in any way at all. We succeeded in maintaining the complete status quo, we went in and we got out, clean and educated, ready to do nothing at all in life except for what is asked of us. Our degrees imprison us all. I will sooner hire an uneducated man who can defend his values, possesses the will to learn, and only desire to one day stand equipped in a world of uncertainty, than to hire a fresh, academically decorated and blindly arrogant man who feeds off of an ego that pushes his wife to sleep with the babysitter, who has never doubted himself, and who entertains an intolerable sense of entitlement to benefits unknown to him and perhaps even nonexistent to anyone.

Let us improve our future by changing the beginning of it.

Elementary School:

Ability to usefully Google Search (mind-mapping, hierarchal thinking)

Algorithms and Computation (mathematical logic, set theory)

Programming (computer fundamentals, OS and AI)

Journal-writing, self-reflection, fictional reading (finding individual voice in literature)

Grand Engineering wonders introduced (3D printer, Internet, smartphone, bionics) without scientific method

Team Projects (growing gardens and building societally beneficial projects – buildings, apps, etc)

NOTE: this period should not impose any schools of thought on the student, it is a time of self-discovery where students should establish their own truths about their world

Middle School:

Philosophy and Theory of Knowledge (intro to scientific method + physics)

Western Hemisphere history (industrial revolution, how nations have grown)

Mathematical Basis (rigorous math)

Software Development (structured programming for large applications – Big Data Analytics)

Journal-writing, self-reflection, fiction and science fiction reading (authoritative papers + novel writing)

New team projects, Poster/Skype presentations (improve communication skills for global setting)

NOTE: here is where students are first exposed to prejudices and the laws that were established by men seeking understanding nature – everything should be based in a historical context so that students do not confuse law with indisputable fact. Learning to deal with doubt and how to rectify uncertainties.

High School:

Historical context for philosophy

Eastern History, World Religions

Thesis chosen junior year to present and defend at senior graduation

Creative Project started sophomore year and built at senior graduation

NOTE: a taste for real world experiences, students should be encouraged to break down everything they have learned and reassemble a world that they would want to live in as adults

College:

An extensive network of contacts and resources at a sociably affordable price for those who merit (ability to prove at any age) to have limitless tools at their disposal to create tomorrow for everyone else.

Instruction would only be entertained between students, and professors would periodically learn from college students before returning to High and Middle schools to prepare the next generation for the world. The value of professors would rise, because they would be the center of this expansive network of tomorrow and would naturally assume advisory roles in the lives of graduated collegiate students who run their own companies and agencies.