A No to School

by John Lobell

Summer is over, and school is restarting. Is it ok to say no to school? Once schools held a monopoly on learning resources—libraries, labs, lectures. Today all of this is free online or open source.

In the 1940s and 50s, when boys with unkempt hair were scolded by their mothers and they said that Einstein had unkempt hair, their mothers would respond, “When you are as smart and famous as Einstein, you can keep your hair unkempt.” One can imagine similar exchanges today regarding Bill Gates and dropping out of college. But while Bill Gates famously dropped out of Harvard, he is far from alone. Steve Jobs, Larry Ellison, Michael Dell, Mark Zuckerberg, and Jack Dorsey, founders of Apple, Oracle, Dell, Facebook, and Twitter, dropped out of college, and Sergey Brin and Larry Page, founders of Google, dropped out of graduate school. More recently, David Karp, founder of the social networking site, Tumblr, didn’t drop out of college, as he didn’t go to college; he dropped out of prestigious Bronx Science high school. His mother saw how bored he was in school and how absorbed he was at night in front of his computer. Seeing that his passion was computers, she encouraged him to drop out of school.

Michael Ellsberg, author of The Education of Millionaires, writes, “If a young person happens to retain enough creative spirit to start a business upon graduation, she does so in spite of her schooling, not because of it.” Perhaps they were all motivated by the spirit of Alexander, who led armies at the age of sixteen, and who modeled his life on that of Achilles. Steve Jobs remarked, “None of us has any idea how long we’re going to be here, nor do I, but my feeling is I’ve got to accomplish a lot of these things while I am young.” It is not necessarily that schools are teaching the wrong things, but that they crowd out the opportunity for something else: actually doing what one aspires to do.

So what is going on here?

A Framework

Education in general and liberal education in particular are in crisis. Career preparation is attacked as vocational. Educators will not agree on any common bodies of knowledge that an educated person should have. And those in the liberal arts claim that they are teaching “critical thinking,” but they cannot say what that is. How about a “framework.”

If your education was cohesive, it should have given you a framework into which you can weave what you will do for the rest of your life. What you weave into your framework should strengthen it, enrich it, fill it out. A framework situates you so that you are not buffeted about by every new thing that comes along. And it may be that you challenge and rework your framework. It should be flexible. But if your education was a series of randomly thrown together unrelated happenings, you will have no coherent place to hang your ongoing experience. You will accumulate your learning and even your life haphazardly and it will never make sense.

If your education was not cohesive, if it failed to provide you with such a framework, you might begin to construct one for yourself. We will see an example of how this can be done when we look at Joseph Campbell’s self-education below.

Schools

The most important thing a school can do is to have a cohesive point of view that helps you form a framework, but this is rare today. Despite this failure, schools have an inordinate influence on our lives, far beyond what they should have. For example in order to teach musical composition today you must obtain a PhD, and that might take until your late thirties. Some would not have made it. Chopin died at thirty-nine, Gershwin at thirty-eight, Bizet at thirty-seven, Mozart at thirty-five, and Schubert at thirty-one. And Kurt Cobain, Brian Jones, Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, Jim Morrison, and Amy Winehouse are among the dozens of Rock stars who died at the age of twenty-seven. Just think what they could have accomplished if they had lived long enough to have finished graduate school. We could make the same observation regarding writing. Sylvia Plath and Emily Brontë died at thirty, Stephen Crane and Percy Bysshe Shelley at twenty-nine, and John Keats at twenty-five. Arthur Rimbaud died at thirty-seven, but stopped writing at twenty-one, leaving Europe with the remark, “True life is elsewhere,” to become a gunrunner. And none of them had a PhD.

In physics, George Gamow observes that Newton came up with his law of gravity at twenty-three, Einstein with his theory of relativity at twenty-six; and Niels Bohr his theory of the atom at twenty-seven. Gamow adds that he published his work on the transformations of the atomic nucleus at twenty-four. Today’s physicists not have completed their PhDs at such ages, and are not permitted to make such contributions. And today physics is a group effort. Fundamental breakthroughs (paradigm shifts that destroy old approaches and introduce new ones) by individuals are no longer welcome—they are too threatening to established physics.

An Example

Most colleges no longer have any vision of their purposes. They have abandoned agreed-on bodies of material, or canons, with which you should be familiar, and as we mention above, they have also abandoned cohesive points of view around which you could organize the material they present. So you are on your own. How might you go about putting together your own personal canon and point of view? Let’s look at the example of the mythologist, Joseph Campbell. Campbell studied medieval literature at Columbia University and in 1927 went to Paris and then Munich to continue his studies. But while in Europe he also became interested in the current cultural scene, discovering, among others, the psychologists Freud and Jung, the painters Picasso and Klee, and the novelists Joyce and Mann, figures not yet widely known in this country. He returned to the states with a broader vision for the direction of his studies, but Columbia informed him that there was no place in academia for his vision.

The stock market had crashed, so Campbell went to Woodstock in New York where he was able to rent a cabin for fifty dollars a year. Buying books on credit, he lined his shelves with the world’s literature and read nine hours a day for five years, often pursuing threads backwards. He read Spengler, who mentions Nietzsche, so he read Nietzsche, which took him back to Schopenhauer, and then back to Kant. Then he returned to Joyce, whom he had read while in Paris, and saw that Joyce was addressing the same issues as was Schopenhauer. Then Jung again, seeing the parallels between his thinking and that of Spengler. He read carefully, underlining, putting notes in the margins, absorbing material, putting together the ideas he would later present in his major works, The Hero With a Thousand Faces and The Masks of God, which are rich with references to the philosophies, literatures, myths, arts, and religions of many cultures, ideas that underlie our approach to mythology to this day.

Campbell arrived at an organizing insight that pulled together what he had mastered and provided him a framework within which to add new material. Campbell’s insight was that what we call the philosophies, literatures, myths, arts, and religions of the world’s cultures are not separate disciplines, but are, for each culture, a supra-psychology—metaphors for its experiencings of the self, the world, and the cosmos, and the “opening through which the inexhaustible energies of the cosmos pour into human cultural manifestation.”

Of course you will not follow Campbell’s path, and you will not arrive at his organizing insight; your organizing insight might not even come from books. It is up to you to find your own path and your own organizing insight for today. Just realize that school will not find them for you.

For more on this and related matters, see my book, Visionary Creativity. You can buy the book on Amazon and Barnes and Noble.