Here’s a couple of tips that might help.
Think about a topic you’re already interested in and then try to find a connection to the topic you need to study. In looking for this connection you will be learning more about the subject but in a way that interests you since you’re looking for connections to something you already find interesting. Think about a question you want answered or a problem you’d like to solve. Make the time you spend studying a search for insights to help answer your question or solve the problem. This could be a question or problem in another subject or something outside of school entirely. In each case you are focusing on making connections to something you already have an interest in. So, the studying becomes a way to investigate something your interest. When I was in school taking classes another approach I used which was similar to the ones above was to always be on the lookout for ways I could use what I was learning. Sometimes these were not obvious but again if you are looking for a way to use what you are learning, you will be learning the material but in a more fun way. You certainly can get a home schooled college education. What you cannot get is an accredited degree. For the moment the only source of this credential is an accredited university or college. That may change in the future but for now it represents the major drawback to drying to do college at home.
The one exception to this point could be if you were wanting to receive a college education in a field such as nursing, medicine, or some other field which requires a certain amount of time in a specific setting that a college classroom offers. Beyond that negative factor the other major negative factor I think you would miss out on is the chance to do some professional networking with professors and other peers who could be professionals in your field. You might also consider a negative effect that you will miss out on some uniquely college related social activities. This would be true if you were interested in joining a fraternity or sorority. What is interesting though is that each of these negative effects can be overcome. You can get a college level education in most any liberal arts subject you can think of at home. You can still engage in professional networking. And, of course, you can still avail yourself of many opportunities to socialize. The idea that there might be alternatives to pursuing a conventional college degree is not new but it is still a relatively uncommon notion. However, it is growing in popularity due to one major negative effect that getting your college degree may entail: going deeply into debt. For that reason, many people are now considering other alternatives. For more on these you might find these books interesting: Hacking Your Education by Dale Stephens Better Than College by Blake Boles DUY U by Anya Kamenetz At the very least it could be comparable. But, potentially it could be much better.
Put yourself in the place of an interviewer for a job you want. The interviewer has a choice between two candidates. The first candidate has a conventional four-year degree in English or Communications or some other general education major. For the sake of this example, I should point out that this candidate's degree does qualify them for the job for which they are interviewing. The second candidate does not have a conventional degree. What this candidate has is a digital portfolio which outlines all of the learning activities they have engaged in for the past 5 years including such things as taking courses online from universities all over the country (a psychology course from Harvard, a biology course from Yale, communications from Duke, history from UCLA, and so on). To show mastery of the material in each of these courses the candidate has written several papers on various topics related to the course and many papers showing connections between several courses and the insights gained from them. This candidate also has links to various other online profiles including a LinkedIn profile with quite a few connections, endorsements, and recommendations. An active Twitter account with a decent number of followers and retweets. Several internships with companies in fields relevant to the job they are interviewing for now with recommendations from those in the company that the candidate worked with. Like many jobs that this second candidate has interviewed for, this one has a formal degree requirement but it is not a requirement that is inflexible. This second candidate was able to get an interview based on their portfolio and is in the running for the job. So, if you were the interviewer which candidate would you hire? At some point, shortly many employers are going to recognize that the second candidate is far superior in several areas. They have stronger motivation and passion for their learning as evidenced by the amount of effort and work they put in to craft a portfolio not simply earn a degree. At some point, employers are going to start asking the following question to those with a conventional degree: Is that all you did was attend classes and earn the degree? You could have taken courses from universities all over the country with the best scholars in their fields. Why didn’t you take advantage of all that available knowledge? The movement to do college like homeschooling is still relatively small, but it is growing. In the face of continued increases in tuition and the number of resources available online for free, I expect that this alternative approach to higher education will continue to grow. It will take a more highly motivated student to succeed in putting this kind of higher education together. They will need to draw in resources from a wide variety of sources including books, online courses, internships. They will also need to validate this learning in unique and varied ways such as blogging, posting articles on various websites, establishing a professional presence on LinkedIn, and using digital badges. But, for the student willing to do this, I think the payoff will be beneficial. If the competition is still “just earning a degree” it will be possible to outpace them and show potential employers that you provide a great deal of value. And, if the employer does require a college degree they may be willing to pay you to complete the degree. Not a bad deal! Here are some useful resources available for learning more about doing college as homeschooling: Hacking Your Education: Ditch the Lectures, Save Tens of Thousands, and Learn More than Your Peers Ever Will by Dale Stephens Better Than College: How to Build a Successful Life Without a Four-year Degree by Blake Boles DIY U: Edupunks, Edupreneurs, and the Coming Transformation of Higher Education by Anya Kamenetz This is a nearly impossible question to answer in advance. Many will argue that anything irrelevant to you is not worth learning. But, how can you know what is or will be relevant to you without first learning about it?
Of course, you can’t learn everything there is to know but it is also not a good idea to rule out learning anything without first investigating it. You never know what might be useful and if you’re interested in improving your creativity and critical thinking skills, the more you learn, the more you will improve these skills. Let’s consider, as an example of learning, creativity. What is creativity? Can it be learned? How do creative people think? These are some of the questions that Jonah Lehrer looks at in his book Imagine: How Creativity Works. One insight I think is particularly important and provides a useful argument for the importance of learning as much as you can even if it seems irrelevant to your area of study or your current job. Creativity requires the mixing of ideas and to do this, you need to be exposed to many different ideas from many different areas of knowledge. There are countless examples of this process that could illustrate the point. One of the most famous is the example of Steve Jobs being inspired by a course in calligraphy he took. This led to the development of the many different fonts in one of the first Apple computers. In his book The Mind and the Brain, Jeffrey Schwartz writes about using the insights of Austrian economics combined with Buddhism to help develop a treatment for obsessive-compulsive disorder. In neither case would that knowledge seem to have been worth knowing. Not until an application presented itself. But, that application would not have presented itself if these subjects weren’t first learned. This is what Louis Pasteur meant when he said that “chance favors the prepared mind.” In Lehrer’s book, he describes a similar process of combining ideas. Dan Wieden, co-founder of the advertising agency Wieden+Kennedy came up with the “Just Do It” Nike slogan by thinking about a murderer named Gary Gilmore whose last words at his execution in 1977 were “Let’s do it.” He was originally prompted to think about Gilmore due to a discussion with one of his colleagues who happened to mention the writer Norman Mailer. As Wieden puts it “we were talking about Mailer, and I knew that he had written a book about Gary Gilmore. And that was it. That’s where the slogan came from. Just a little sentence from someone else. That’s all it takes.” The point is that’s all it takes if you have a sufficiently large store of ideas from which to draw and make connections. Where do these ideas come from? Well, one of the best ways to assemble this storehouse is to read widely, learn about different subjects, have a well-rounded general knowledge of the world, and remain curious. All of these are elements of a good education and are too often missing in what passes for education these days in most primary, secondary, and post-secondary schools. Much of education these days seems to be very focused on relevance. We are told that students want to learn what is relevant to them and will respond best when given relevant information. As educators, we are told that this is the reason why students do not read many books, certainly not the classics. They just aren’t relevant. But, what is the a priori relevance of calligraphy to developing a computer? What is the a priori relevance of Austrian economics to treatment for OCD? And, what is the a priori relevance of the murderer Gary Gilmore to coming up with an advertising slogan? Judged by our current standard none of these are relevant and would not merit knowing about. So, the question becomes: How much creativity are we depriving students of (and they are depriving of themselves) by only focusing on the relevant? In a world where there is a premium of creativity, critical thinking, and problem-solving don’t we need to be teaching more irrelevant information than ever before? So, don’t rule out anything as “not worth learning” until you’ve learned a little about it. And, even then you won’t be dismissing it as “not worth learning” but simply as not worth learning more about at this time. Who knows when that might change? |