The Education of Millionaires - Michael Ellsberg [96]
Experience (including error) provides the basis for learning activities . . .
Adults need to be responsible for their decisions on education; involvement in the planning and evaluation of their instruction . . .
Adults are most interested in learning subjects having immediate relevance to their work and/or personal lives . . .
Adult learning is problem-centered rather than contentoriented ...
Adults respond better to internal versus external motivators . . .
The term has been used by some to allow discussion of contrast between self-directed and ‘taught’ education.7
It turns out that the millionaires I’ve been talking to who did not complete their formal education didn’t forsake education at all. They were simply following andragogy rather than pedagogy.
Think of the opposite of the above description of andragogy: Few reasons ever given to learn something, other than “You need to learn this to get a good grade and graduate.” Conditioning kids to be averse to making mistakes, rather than teaching kids that going out, trying lots of ambitious stuff, making a ton of mistakes in the process, and learning from those mistakes is the essence of how you become good at something. Forcing a bunch of content down kids’ throats that has little relevance to their life goals and thus bears little interest to them, rather than teaching them how to solve problems they care about. And of course, lots and lots of external motivators. This is pedagogy—teaching for children. It is characterized, in essence, by beating education into mostly unwilling kids.
(Sometimes literally. Marc has just become involved in a national movement to end corporal punishment in American schools. He informed me, to my shock, that corporal punishment in schools is legal in twenty states, that over 222,000 students are physically disciplined each year by an educator, and that over 20,000 need to seek medical attention because of it. “You can’t hit a prisoner in all fifty states in the Union. But you can hit students, as discipline, in twenty states,” he told me. Anthony Adams, Elliott Bisnow’s dorm adviser from Success Skill #2, is also a leading voice in this movement. The startling anachronism of legalized state corporal punishment belies the century-old roots of our educational system—turning kids into compliant factory workers upon graduation. It also shows how irrelevant pedagogy has become to current economic realities. Could you imagine trying to beat someone—literally or figuratively—into starting a company or coming up with a brilliant technological innovation?)
Thank goodness the people in this book started treating themselves as adults early on—because few people in the educational system ever will. Though I doubt many of the self-educated people in this book have heard of the term “andragogy,” they are all masters of it. That’s why they’re rich and successful, while most people—who have had their instinct for creative self-education beaten out of them by sixteen years of pedagogy—are not.
It turns out that nearly everyone I spoke to for this book has this in common: a serious passion for lifelong learning. Put another way, they do not front-load their education early on with pedagogy rammed down their throats, removing themselves from the workforce and taking on lots of debt to do so. Rather, they follow lifelong learning through continual, steady, gradual investment in themselves over time as adults.
Matt Mullenweg is passionate about the importance of developing a habit of lifelong learning and reading, both professionally and personally. During the time he was studying at the University of Houston, in the early 2000s, he began to teach himself to program in a language called PHP, through free online tutorials. He didn’t have a particularly technical background—his passion in high school had been jazz saxophone—but soon he started doing simple tasks in PHP from this self-teaching.