The Education of Millionaires - Michael Ellsberg [126]
Weisberg’s complaint neatly encompasses nearly all the commonplace assumptions about higher education we’ve been questioning all along in this book. The most glaring is that college is the only way young people can continue their intellectual development; I believe the stories I’ve told throughout this book of self-educated people put that belief to rest.
Weisberg also assumes that college is really about “love of knowledge for its own sake.” A critic of one of the New York Times articles about Cortney Munna, cited earlier, echoes the sentiment in a comment on the Times site. “What [Munna] has learned is what a university offers: the tools to understand the world and society. She will do well, even though it’ll be tough paying off those [$97,000 in] loans.”
I’m all for the love of knowledge for its own sake, and for the tools to understand the world and society. One look at my own bookshelf, full of philosophy, psychology, politics, literature, poetry, spirituality, biography, and popular science, should make that clear. But can Weisberg, and this commenter on the Times site, look at me with a straight face and suggest that kids should spend a hundred or two hundred thousand dollars, and rack up a hundred grand in debt, at the outset of their adult lives, to pursue “love of knowledge for its own sake” and “the tools to understand society”? Can’t you pursue the love of knowledge throughout your entire lives in less outrageously expensive ways that don’t involve crippling debt, such as—gasp!—reading on your own after work and on weekends, or taking an online class?
When a respected commentator calls the prospect of a young person receiving $100,000 to pursue entrepreneurship for a few years—in lieu of going $100,000 into debt—“nasty” and “appalling,” I cannot help but think we have come into Orwellian times around education, in which “Mountains of Debt Is Freedom.”
Finally, the showstopper: Weisberg’s suggestion that encouraging entrepreneurship among young people causes them to lose “respect for middle-class values.” In American political culture, suggesting that some stance disrespects middle-class values usually ends the discussion right then and there; it’s the rhetorical equivalent of farting loudly in the middle of a live television debate. Can we really question middle-class values?
Actually, yes, we can. Middle-class values are essentially the stuff of the employee mind-set, the precise values that have led so many young people to be completely fucked in our current economy: follow orders, get all the checkmarks that parents and teachers and society and politicians tell you to get, stick with the herd, don’t stick your neck out too much, don’t try anything too bold, just do as you’re told and there will be a nice cushy job with governmentand company-sponsored benefits aplenty waiting for you to guide you through your safe life and your comfortable, secure retirement. This might have been a good set of values to guide young people in 1950, but not in 2011.
I asked Thiel why he wanted to pay promising young people to “stop out” of school. He said: “Some of my friends and I were thinking, ‘What can we do to encourage more innovation, more entrepreneurship?’ The basic fact is, when you come up with a great idea for something new, the correct thing is to just do it. Because there’s no training for it, there’s no way you can prepare for being an entrepreneur. By definition, you tend to be doing something new, that’s not been done, and so there’s no really good tracked training you can get. Even though I think the formal school isn’t necessarily incompatible