James Altucher has a cheat sheet for learning, and traditional schools are not on the list.
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I’m a functional idiot by any measurement. I just realized the highest level of math I’ve used in the past year. Heck, the past 25 years. Well…More on that in a second. But you’ll see. It’s pathetic.
What about other subjects? What have I made use of in life?
What about Shakespeare or Chaucer? Have they done much for me this year?
My entire education led up to a job interview that would let me blow shit up.
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Or SCIENCE? And can someone tell me the actual reason for World War I? Or what percentage of the population supported the Revolutionary War? I have no idea. I’m going to look it up before I finish this post. Stick with me.
So where did education get me?
My first job interview after college was with Lincoln Laboratories run by MIT. The job description: develop software to determine what objects in space were garbage and what were Soviet missiles.
My entire education led up to a job interview that would let me blow shit up.
Now, having been out in the real world for 23 years I can tell you exactly what you need to know to be “educated”.
And by that I mean: thrive in COMMERCE, in LOVE, in CREATIVITY, and in PEACE. (With “commerce” and “love” I assume you are providing value and help to others and making the world a better place).
Note, this is only what works for me. For you, I have no idea.
You might need Chaucer. Maybe you work in Canterbury, England and you need Chaucer to survive cocktail parties and first dates.
So to repeat: what follows is what I need to know to consider myself educated as defined above.
This is also how I would change education if I had the chance.
Let’s take it subject by subject.
MATH – I’ve been a computer programmer, an entrepreneur, an investor, daytrader, etc. All areas that needed “math”.
The highest level of math I needed to know in the past 25 years …
Percentages.
Like… how to do them in my head quickly.
That’s it.
You don’t need Calculus. You never need to know what an integral is. You don’t need geometry. I consider myself educated but if you ask me to define an “isosceles” triangle I wouldn’t be able to do it.
In fact, I couldn’t spell it. I wrote it, then there was that red line under it, so I right clicked and fixed it.
Thank you GOD and ALLAH for inventing that little red line thing.
(of course, an educated programmer did that. But that comes out of interest. Not out of force-feeding Java to 12 year olds).
I don’t know the quadriplegic formula or anything like that. I can’t solve for “X”. Unless it’s on someone I love. Then I’m very good at problem solving.
LITERATURE. First off, here’s what you DON’T need to know: Shakespeare, Chaucer, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Emerson, F Scott Fitzgerald (The Great Gatsby was nowhere near as good as his first novel, “This Side of Paradise” which nobody teaches in high school), and high school English teaches zero contemporary or ethnic writers.
Nobody in my kid’s high school knows who James Baldwin is, for instance. They left out gay, black writers when they taught Chaucer.
So other than “Old Man and the Sea”, a book about fishing, and “Catcher in the Rye”, a book about a rich kid who goes to private school and lives in the Upper East Side, school doesn’t teach anything written after 1950.
What about culture, you might ask? I don’t know. Teach your kids about culture. Don’t outsource it to Chaucer who, chances are, has nothing to do with your particular culture. And he lived 600 years ago. There’s been a lot better writers since him.
I’ll save writing in a bit. Since current schools don’t teach kids how to write AT ALL and that’s a shame.
SCIENCE: you actually need to know NOTHING.
Biology textbooks are hopelessly outdated. As are physics textbooks. There are better resources online where you can learn faster without the pressure of tests and homework. But unless you are doing CPR soon, you don’t need to know anything.
Nobody remembers the muscle names five minutes after the test is over. Unless you are a chiropractor or a surgeon when was the last time you made use of basic biology.
And I have never used my knowledge of chemistry or physics in the past 25 years.
Chemistry is useless. You will never in your entire life need to mix two chemicals in a lab to create a chemical reaction. Unless you are breaking bad and making a meth lab. Good luck with that.
In physics they might teach you Newton. Well, he was wrong. Einstein replaced him. Then Heisinger replaced him. Now there’s string theory. Then membrane theory replaced that.
Nobody is right. And when will you use this in practical life? Even at cocktail parties people will zone out when you start scribbling n-dimensional equations on a napkin.
I know this because I zoned out when someone did that to me to describe how he would make a time machine. I always speak from experience.
Here’s another basic question: other than anecdotes, can you actually prove the Earth is round? I can’t. Nor would it even change my life if someone told me the Earth was a triangle. It wouldn’t make me a better or worse person.
HISTORY: First thing: forget everything they teach you in school. None of it is correct OR none of it you will remember. Probably all of it is lies.
At every talk I give I ask, “when was Charlemagne born?”. Nobody has ever given me an answer that is correct within 500 years. The most important king of Europe ever.
So I looked it up myself, many times. Then proceeded to get it wrong on the audio version of my book. So I looked it up again so I could get it right in my book. Well, I got it wrong. And do you know what that has cost me in life? Nothing.
Here’s the other thing about history classes. They try to give complicated justifications for wars. Wars have never created peace. They only create more wars and kill lots of 18 year olds.
First, schools rarely teach about the Vietnam War. They sort of stop with World War II and say, “The US has never lost a war”.
But even WWII has dubious beginnings. “We saved the Jews”. No we didn’t. Six million died. And Roosevelt sent back to Auschwitz the ones who were begging to come to America.
And then the legacy of World War II let Stalin kill another twenty million people and Mao kill another sixty million people. In fact, spend some time reading the writings of pacifists during World War II and they are almost all jewish rabbis (source: Nicholson Baker’s book on WWII).
Even the sacred Revolutionary War was only supported by about 30 percent of the population and was started for all the wrong reasons (most people can’t actually give me the reasons for the Boston Tea Party, for instance).
This is all prelude to the fact that almost all news headlines (the footnotes that add up to future history) are misinformation placed there on purpose to get you to buy papers rather than actually give you useful information.
I think I’ve covered all the main topics. So what do you need to learn?
MATH- I mentioned above: Percentages in your head. That’s it.
LITERATURE – read whatever you want or don’t want.
Hopefully you WILL enjoy reading but if you don’t, then you will gain nothing by reading a book. Studies show that people forget what they read 45 minutes after they read it if they weren’t interested.
The BENEFIT of reading is that while someone else spent a lifetime getting the information you are reading, you can get pick that information up in a few hours. If you read a lot of books then it’s as if you’ve absorbed many lives.
That’s pretty cool. Like a magic pill.
So better to read than not read. But it’s not a requirement for success. In fact, studies show that illiterate people often develop workarounds to avoid being penalized for their functional illiteracy. The National Center of Education Statistics contends that up to 50% of people in the US are functionally illiterate.
WRITING – VERY IMPORTANT. Everyone needs to learn how to write.
Whether you send emails, texts, tweets, business plans, status updates, or give talks, you need to learn how to communicate through text.
People say: to write well, you need to read a lot. This is not true.
The short cut to learn how to write well is not by reading good books. This is a common misconception. The real shortcut is to read great direct mail sales letters.
These open with a BOOM! so you can’t turn away, they are structurally designed to get a point across, to keep your eyes going down the page, to get rid of all the common arguments against an idea, and to surprise you at the end with a sweetener so that at the end you say “YES!”.
IF YOU THEN WANT, read “Old Man and the Sea” and you will be a better writer. No kidding.
Feel free to disagree with me on this. Old Man and the Sea will teach you nothing about anything, but it will teach you how to write short sentences with emotional impact.
You can argue, “but reading is pleasurable”. It is for me, for instance. But not for many people (only 13% of Americans are considered “literate”).
This is almost all you need to know. If you know how to communicate, do percentages, understand that almost all history is lies and that all science is questionable (not in a religious way but actually in a scientific way), then you can succeed in life.
Oh, read Claudia’s recent post about the best salesman ever or my post on “The Ultimate Cheat Sheet For Selling Anything“.
THE MOST IMPORTANT THING FOR A GOOD LIFE:
But you need ONE MORE THING and I hate to say it because I say it in many posts.
You need to be physically healthy. You need to be around people who inspire you. You need to write down ten ideas a day to keep the creativity flowing and the idea muscle exercised. And you need to keep the gratitude muscle exercised.
IMPORTANT: The gratitude muscle and the idea muscles are like the sixth and seventh senses on top of our normal five senses.
With eyes you can see the world. With your tongue you can taste the world. Etc.
But with a strong idea muscle you can see ALL of the possible worlds. Like tasting the fourth dimension.
And with a strong gratitude muscle, you can see the filaments of possibility that bind all the worlds together. The things that keep the clock ticking. I don’t say this in a pseudo-science way. I have no science on this. I only say it because it’s worked for me.
I say it because I do it.
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Here’s my ideal curriculum for a kid:
– Do one creative thing a week (write, paint, etc). The brain needs the exercise.
– Read one book a week (if you are interested)
– Rip apart whatever the headline is of the Monday morning New York Times and explain why it’s misinformation. (Or pick the Washington Post. Whatever newspaper you want. They are all the same.).
– And then do whatever interests you (via free courses all over the Internet, coursera is my favorite, History, engineering, whatever interests you only)
– Be healthy in all the ways I describe.
I wish I had been taught this way. Now I am busy unschooling myself in this way.
Charlemagne was born April 2, 742. There’s no way I’m going to remember that past one hour from now.
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p.s. if you can think of anything else that people need to know, please add it in the comments so I can learn.
photo credit: Open your mind by Flickr/Pelle Sten
please stay away from children.
Empathy is an important thing to learn and practice. Schools try to teach it, but ultimately, it must be taught and enforced in the home.
The best education is no education? Err… Really? This is the advice that you want to give to our nation at this point in its history? That it’s people should be even LESS scientifically literate and even LESS numerate? I… Uhh… I mean… Damn dude. Seriously. Damn. The point of higher education is not to get a job (sadly, it appears as though we have let corporations here in the Us convince us that it is the point) the idea is to have a better, more well-rounded, education public that can benefit itself from what education brings. You might not… Read more »
I think you’re missing the point of studying things like Chaucer or chemistry that likely won’t have any real world application. The idea of upper level science and math is to develop the part of your brain that thinks abstractly and solves problems. Analyzing a work of literature written in an archaic form of English enhances overall reading comprehension and the ability to recognize subtext and themes. The point of studying some of these things is not so you can recall the Pythagorean theorem at 50 years old, but to develop your ability to think, question, analyze, and problem-solve –… Read more »
Some excellent points. But you’re wrong about the connection between the reading and writing thing.
First off to get it out of the way, I am a public school teacher who will readily admit that there’s a lot that needs to be changed about the education system in this country. That being said, when was the last time you were in a high school setting because the curriculum you are describing seems very 1950’s to me. Critical thinking is one of the number one things focused on right now in schools, history departments do a great job of discussing the whitewashing the traditional canon taught for years and a lot of time is spent focusing… Read more »
Whoa… what did Chaucer ever do to you? He’s a fun read… as are various other works of great literature, which can provide ways of thinking about what it means to be human. Don’t trash those books and deprive yourself of the pleasure of learning. Education is about living a good life and enjoying having a mind, not about pleasing some daddy-employer.
Well, Chaucer did nothing to me. or for me. Which is why I see no reason to force it on 50 million kids coming in the next generation.
Let them read what they want. Why read something written by a guy in 1400 that they might totally hate and then get turned off on literature forever. Better to say, “here’s a library. Find one book here that you might like.”
If you don’t teach a general outline of science, history, math etc. people will lose general understanding of everyday life. People will be less practical without science as they won’t understand how things work, less understanding of everyday life if they don’t know history and opportunities in finance, economics, engineering and various sciences would be lost if children aren’t taught maths. Shakespeare provided a social commentary in his works and they portrayed useful messages to learn from. Schools aren’t all as biased as you makes them seem (at least not here in NZ). Also, how would you have got your… Read more »
i would agree with you accept…how many people actually remember the general outline of science, history, math, etc. You might. but then you would have an amazing memory unlike 99% of your peers. That’s why I test this theory out. I ask people to tell me when Charlemagne was born when I give talks. Nobody ever gets it right with FIVE HUNDRED YEARS. You can’t get any more general in history than the first king who unified Europe after the Roman Empire. And yet nobody remembers to within 500 years when he was born. What about science. Who remembers ALL… Read more »
Awesome! Love it 2 things to add to your list: 1 NLP (Neuro Linguistic Programming – fancy name for getting your own subconscious brain to make all the cool sh*t you want happen in your life, in spite of all the crap it’s been preconditioned to do by all the idiots in the world) When I started looking into this at age 27, I was furious that this awesome sh*t is not the mainstay of our education system. It’s some cool sh*t, look it up 2 Your appearance Vs who you are This is very important. All my childhood I… Read more »
A doctor needs to know about human anatomy. A lawyer needs to be able to look up and memorize laws. An astrophysicist needs to understand general relativity. An English teacher is going to read and teach the “classics”. But, like you said, this might not apply to everyone.
Okay, but what if you went through high school and didn’t have anatomy, history, science, or any of the classics (historical or contemporary)? You’d be screwed when you start a pre-law program. Everyone else sitting in the class has at least 4 years of prior knowledge. I think society would be doing a disservice to not give this prior knowledge. Other times, I think society is doing a disservice with the education programs we currently offer, K-12 and beyond).
The real issue is that they don’t remember the “4 years of prior knowledge”. People might remember a fact here and there but A) 99% of high schools don’t teach real problem solving. They just teach the answers to standardized tests B) much research shows you don’t remember anything you read or listen to unless you are actively interested in retaining the information. The human brain evolved over 5 million years to be really good at retaining information about it’s environment that are needed to survive (where are the wild animals hiding) but really bad at remembering things relating to… Read more »
I totally agree with you from about 7th grade on. All the stuff you are talking about requires a maturity that just isn’t found before than (in most young people). Also, you are reflecting. You wouldn’t be able to reflect on any of this if you hadn’t had the background and prior knowledge that you got from your schooling, good or bad. I view education as opportunity. I had not idea what I was interested in when I was in middle school and high school other than sports and the occasional relationship. Had I wanted to be in something historical,… Read more »
I agree that in 4th grade kids don’t know what they want to do.
It’s also the rare individual that knows what he wants to do at 20…40..50..even 60.
Hence I think education should be as undirected as possible, as early as possible, and let the brain wander where it may. For an entire lifetime.
Interesting article — I agree and disagree in equal measures. Guess it depends on how one defines what “education” is. However, there’s a typo. It’s not “… Heisinger replaced him..” I’m pretty sure you mean Heisenberg. You might want to add “learn how to edit” under the writing category. Regardless, interesting hearing your opinion on all of it.