11011 Education versus Getting a Degree. Do you want an education or are you only interested in a degree?
I have never let school interfere with my education. — Mark Twain
“Getting an education” and “getting a degree” are not necessarily the same thing.
You can get a degree AND get an education, or . . .
You can end up with a degree and not much actual education.
You can get an education and not earn a degree.
Getting an education may include earning a degree. A degree is not necessary to get an education.
A degree proves that you can survive four years or more at an institution.
Acquiring a degree is a matter of getting your ticket punched an appropriate number of times.
Degree requirements are as much about employing professors as they are about educating students. The last time I was in school, even though I was a music major, I was not allowed to take a course in music software to satisfy a degree requirement for a computer class. Instead, the school demanded that I take a course in word processing and spreadsheets, which I had been using for a decade in business.
The problem, as explained to me, was that the music software class was taught in the music department while the word processing class was taught in the computer department. The computer department was not about to give up its turf of three hours tuition of my total college bill.
You may want a career in a field where a degree is a requirement. You have to get a degree, but you can choose how you do that. If you want to avoid debt (always a good plan), you can alternate work and school and get through without borrowing money.
But if a degree isn’t actually a requirement for your proposed career, you may want to think twice about whether a college education is actually worth the expense. See 08111, “The Borrower is the slave of the lender,” for more information about the costs and benefits of college education.
If a degree is a requirement for your proposed career, and the job and earning opportunities for that career are not the best, beware of borrowing much money to pay for such a degree. You may be better off working on different career plans.
Or you may abandon the idea of a career and instead simply embrace life, with a plan to earn enough to sustain yourself from a variety of possible income streams.
There are many ways to learn in the modern world. Classroom instruction in a college or university is only one of them, and it may not even be the best option if the goal is to actually learn something useful so that you can earn a living.
Isn’t it interesting that with all the lists of schools these days, no one rates schools based on their ability to actually educate students?
You are in charge of your life. This is your personal good life design. It’s not your parent’s design. It’s not your friends’ design. It is a description of where you want to go in your life. Education is a matter of finding the skills and information you need in order to implement your design for your life.
An education is the ability to successfully direct your own life, to your own design.
When it comes to the big academic business of college —
Take nothing for granted.
Assume nothing
Use the “hermeneutic of suspicion” regarding all pro-college propaganda. Hermeneutics is the art and science of interpreting written texts. A “hermeneutic of suspicion” is a way to say “let the buyer not only beware, but actually be suspicious of what people tell you.”
The need for “Unschooling.”
Human beings enter life as learners. Alas for most of us, as we grow and develop, school systems, whose goal is to graduate obedient and productive worker-drones, destroy curiosity and initiative. Any education that happens in the course of that training is incidental to the actual purposes.
We organize schools like regimented military organizations. The curriculum has as much to do with politics as it does anything else. The anxiety that the fear of failure produces in students drives them away from actual education and toward behaviors and strategies that fool teachers into thinking the students know what they actually don’t know so the students can earn “good grades.”
Since this is all that most students have ever experienced from day one in kindergarten to their high school graduation, the attitudes and behavior developed in coercive school systems carry over into college.
Education and Your Career Design
The question of what education you need begins with observation of your goals and purposes for your life.
What do you want to do with your life? If you want to be a doctor, a nurse, or follow another profession that requires credentials, you will have to go to college. Many people have achieved enormous success without going to or finishing college or even completing high school.
So we come back to the question of what you want to do with your life, which has a lot to do with what your passions are.
Still not sure? Well just dive in and start accumulating knowledge. Find jobs, work, blog, read lots of books. Cast your net widely. Accumulate experiences. Observe your life and journal it. Work on the design for your life — “what you do for a living” is only one aspect of the permaculture design for your life. Aim for multiple income streams in order to ensure you always have some money coming in.
Out of this activity, you come to some idea as to where you want to go. Maybe you start to be more intentional and directed in your learning.
Suppose you decide you want to work on urban structures that make it easy for people to buy food from local farmers.
What does this involve? You need to know about —
- Local food production/market gardening.
- Commercial distribution systems
- Laws, city ordinances, and regulations governing food production and distribution.
- Marketing
- Community organizations
So you start to learn about these things. Maybe you join a community garden or spend a summer as a worker on an organic market farm. You could intern at a food cooperative or bag groceries there as a job. You join community organizations and learn about cooperatives. Over time you develop a knowledge and experience base, plus community connections, that can facilitate your invention of your own job organizing better local food opportunities for people in cities.
Integral to this design process are these components —
- A design for your personal educational program. This plan sets forth everything you intend to achieve by your educational activities.
- Knowledge and skill sets. As part of the design process, you discover what knowledge and skill sets you need.
- Praxis, which involves practicing your skills and putting your knowledge to work by initiating projects and activities. Then you reflect on what you did and practice some more, followed by more praxis, and etc.
- Network with others and create communities of support.
- Market yourself and your ideas
This process will be easier if you do it in the context of your own learning community. This is a group of peers involved with self-educating who come together for mutual support. This is a good stacked function for your permaculture education community.
Don’t assume that going to college and getting a degree is the same thing as learning what you need to know in life.
Don’t assume that going to college and getting a degree are the only ways to have a good life.
You can have a fine life and educate yourself without ever paying one dime of tuition to an academic bureaucracy.