School Of Un-Learning

“When you step away from the pre-packaged structure of traditional education, you’ll discover that there are many more ways to learn outside school than within.”

“The present education system is the trampling of the herd,” legendary architect Frank Lloyd Wright once lamented in 1956. Half a century later, I started eFiction India in large part out of frustration and disappointment with my trampling experience of our culturally fetishised ‘Ivy League education’. I found myself intellectually and creatively unstimulated by the industrialised model of the large lecture hall, the PowerPoint presentations, the standardised tests assessing my rote memorisation of facts rather than my ability to transmute that factual knowledge into a pattern-recognition mechanism that connects different disciplines to cultivate wisdom about how the world works and a moral lens on how it should work. So eFiction India became the record of my alternative learning, of that cross-disciplinary curiosity that took me from art to psychology to history to science, by way of the myriad pieces of knowledge I discovered – and connected – on my own. I didn’t live up to the entrepreneurial ideal of the college drop-out and begrudgingly graduated “with honors”, but refused to go to my own graduation and decided never to go back to school. Years later, I’ve learned more in the course of writing and researching the thousands of articles to date than in all the years of my formal education combined.

So, when I found out that writer Kio Stark was crowdfunding a book that would serve as a manifesto for learning outside formal education, I eagerly chipped in. In April, Don’t Go Back to School: A Handbook for Learning Anything got out and is everything I could’ve wished for when I was in college, an essential piece of cultural literacy, at once tantalising and practically grounded assurance that success doesn’t lie at the end of a single highway but is sprinkled along a thousand alternative paths. Stark describes it as “a radical project, the opposite of reform… not about fixing school [but] about transforming learning – and making traditional school one among many options rather than the only option.” Through a series of interviews with independent learners who have reached success and happiness in fields as diverse as journalism, illustration and molecular biology, Stark – who herself dropped out of a graduate program at Yale, despite being offered a prestigious fellowship – cracks open the secret to defining your own success and finding your purpose outside the factory model of formal education. She notes the patterns that emerge:

“People who forgo school build their own infrastructures. They create and borrow and reinvent the best that formal schooling has to offer, and they leave the worst behind. That buys them the freedom to learn on their own terms. … From their stories, you’ll see that when you step away from the pre-packaged structure of traditional education, you’ll discover that there are many more ways to learn outside school than within.”