213: Self-Directed Learning (Why You Can Quit HS & Be Okay)

Ethan Sawyer  0:09  
Hey, this is Ethan Sawyer, sometimes known as the College Essay Guy. My goal is to bring more ease, joy and purpose into the college application process. Welcome to the College Essay Guy podcast, where it's my job to interview the most brilliant minds in the college admissions and education world, analyze their genius and break it down for you into practical, actionable steps that you can take, whether you're applying to college or helping someone else apply. In this case, it might be considering is college even the right place for you? This is the second of two episodes on homeschooling and self directed learning. My guest is writer, speaker and fellow podcaster Blake bowls, whose work invites students and families to re evaluate the traditional schooling model. Are the typical high school and college experiences really the best ways to spend your time? That's what Blake asks. We'll discuss on this episode. Can you really quit high school and not, like, totally ruin your life? Why is this the best time ever for self directed learning? In Blake's opinion, how can we all be more self directed learners? And why should you Google everything, email strangers and find your nerd clan? The benefits of skipping college or at least taking a gap year, how to know if you're making a decision for you and not your parents. And again, just a fair warning that listening too closely to this episode could mean that this is the very last College Essay Guy podcast episode you ever listened to, and that could actually be a very cool thing. My guest today is Blake Bowles. He is the founder and director of unschool adventures and the author of the art of self directed learning better than college and college without High School. He hosts the off trail learning podcast, and he's currently working on a new book. Blake, welcome to the podcast. Thanks, Ethan, great to be here. I'm so glad you're here. So I'm curious about the new book. What's the new book on the


Blake Boles  2:04  
working title is, why are you still sending your kids to school? Question mark, and I'm trying to get parents who are already thinking like, maybe my kid is not a good fit for school to then just take the next step and and leap into a more radical form of alternative education, instead of sticking with the system that's not really working. And so this is my first book written directly for parents. My first books were written for young people.


Ethan Sawyer  2:27  
Is this? Is this a kind of book that would be relevant for even parents who are considering this? Or is this for students who maybe have tried sort of the conventional route, we'll say, and have found that it doesn't work for them? It's


Blake Boles  2:39  
definitely relevant for someone in your situation. And you know, there are some people who believe that if, if you think your kid's not a good fit for school, keeping them out of primary school is the most important thing you can do, and if, if they go through sixth grade, then there are rapidly be damaged somehow. And I just, I really don't believe that. I've met so many young people who have figured out that they should take an alternative path in middle school or high school, some even in 11th grade, like they're about to graduate from a really good school, and they're like, I'm just, I can't do this anymore, and they leave for their senior year. And so I don't think any time is too late and and you're starting at the perfect time, because your your kids about to go into school, you got to make the hard decisions.


Ethan Sawyer  3:22  
That's how I feel, and that's part of what inspired me to come to the homeschooling conference where we met. So just to give the listener a little context, I'd heard a little bit about Blake and about his work. I checked it out online. There are so many resources. We'll be sharing a few of those, and there will be stuff on the podcast pay the show notes page where you can see all that Blake has been up to, but there's just a wealth of stuff. And I was delighted to meet Blake in person, and we chatted just briefly, and I was like, Hey, can you come on the podcast? And he's like, sure, I do podcasts all the time. So here we are. Let's set context. Blake, what is self directed learning, and how did you first get into thinking about it?


Blake Boles  3:59  
Sure, self directed learning, to me, is really about consent, which I think is something we're going to touch on again later. And so it can be structured. It can be unstructured. A lot of people think it means totally unstructured learning. If there's a curriculum, if there's a class, if there's a teacher, if there's any sort of imposition on a young person, then it's not self directed. I disagree with that. I think that a lot of what self directed young people do often does not involve a curriculum. But you can choose, you can you can fully consent to take on really hard, really structured stuff. And that's what most of these young people do. Even though they don't have curriculums for most of their lives, they still the majority of them go on to college and careers and, you know, highly structured stuff. So self directed learning is consensual learning in my book, and I did not grow up in an alternative education environment. I went to public schools in central California and ended up going to UC Berkeley to study math and science, specifically to study astrophysics, because it sounded extremely impressive, and I thought. That because I did well in math and science in high school, that I should just do that and be like a research scientist. And I got about halfway through a degree, and then realized that I really didn't love math or like real science, like the real hardcore physics enough. And I thought, well, I maybe I could be a high school science teacher. And then I started reading books by like teachers who had taught in the public and private systems for a long time and gotten super frustrated. And the most important person for me in that regard was John Taylor Gatto, the New York City public school teacher who won New York City Teacher of the Year three times in a row, and New York State Teacher of the Year twice in a row. And in 1991 when he received both of those awards for the second time, he quit teaching, and he wrote an op ed to The Wall Street Journal, saying he no longer wanted to make a living hurting kids anymore, and he started writing and lecturing about what he saw as the fundamental deficiencies of the public school system and the Private school system, pretty much all conventional school systems. And I read, I assembled upon one of his books, and that was the beginning of the end for me. And I ended up designing my own degree in alternative education. And so I had a very self directed, a very kind of unschooled second half of college, and I still graduated with a bachelor's degree, albeit, you know, the least marketable degree in the history of UC Berkeley, because I named it myself, and it was called alternative schooling and science education. And really the science education part that was BS, that was just me, you know, trying to justify having two years of science on the books. So that was my that was my gateway into this world, and since then, I've been working in with teenagers who don't go to regular school in a variety of different programs, some of them my own programs, and some of them other people's programs. One


Ethan Sawyer  6:52  
of the things that you shared in your presentation that I found really interesting was this screenshot of the 12 action themes of gatos gorilla curriculum. And I'm gonna, I'm gonna read these because I just want to, sort of, you know, just in terms of, like, sort of setting context for folks and giving some themes that we might be talking about, speak these aloud. And then I also am interested to hear, are there a couple of these that there might have been light bulb moments for you in terms of your journey, early journey getting into self directed learning. So one of these is substantial community service. Another is apprenticeships. And by the way, these are cost free methods to restore primary experience and intellectual quality to schools. That's how this is framed. So we've got substantial community service, apprenticeships, parent partnerships on school time, team projects like gardens, cross age tutoring, talent shows, food, co ops. We've got independent study, work slash study, including starting a business. Mentorships, solitudes, like fishing, hiking, contemplation, silence, etc, adventures or discoveries, like mapping, exploration, meandering, challenge, etc. Field curriculum like furnishing an apartment, shadowing an employee at a job site, analyzing characteristics of good and bad swimming pools. And then we've got improvisational play in groups without guidance. And then the 12th one is flex time, flex space, flex sequence and flex text selection. And I know that in a little bit, we're going to get into some of these, more particular but Were any of these as just as you're hearing about them because you've heard about these, I'm sure bunches of times before, were there any of these particularly meaningful to you as you first started thinking about self directed learning or really getting into it?


Blake Boles  8:34  
What I like about this list is that it highlights pretty much all the parts of school which kids really love. It's all the extracurricular stuff. It's, you know, drama. It's doing some sort of cool internship or apprenticeship, if your school offers that, it's independent study. It's going on an adventure, like if you get a chance to travel internationally with your school, or if you get to go to maybe a competition or conference somewhere else, that's the stuff that really stands out. And that's what stood out in my young life. I went to a summer camp in the mountains of northern California that was very life changing. I went to go live abroad in South America when I was 14 for about a month, and that was a super difficult Spanish immersion experience. And I remember growing and changing and learning, you know, learning Spanish or learning how to do outdoor skills so rapidly, and it was such a contrast to the typical day to day life in school, which was just slow, monotonous, bureaucratic, just a waste of my time and a waste of most other people's time. Yeah, some kids get a lot out of school. I got some things out of school. It was not a complete waste, but it was just so inefficient. You just, you know, reading Gado and reading about how he got his kids out of his middle school English classrooms and into the different parts of New York City, using New York City as a as the curriculum, and not Not he. He says, This is how you restore intellectual quality to schools. And most people, when they hear that phrase, intellectual means academic schools, means you're inside a building. His school was where the neighborhoods in the boroughs of New York and intellect, you know this, the academic analysis for him came after the primary experience kids need to experience real things. Have real boundaries, have feedback, have people push back against them, and that just doesn't happen for most kids in school. It's just this big fake world. It's a giant game that we learn how to play, and it's a waste of most people's time.


Ethan Sawyer  10:35  
I love like you, speaking to the inefficiency, especially as I've gotten older, really, as I look back on my high school experience, which was also a public high school experience, I felt that tension, and I think I like to say to my friends, I think the best class I took in high school was typing, because it really taught me a tool that I've used since, you know, a lot in my life. The other thing I love that you're talking about is I love hearing you say New York City as a curriculum and thinking of the world, and this, you know, an urban environment, for example, as a curriculum, that just really lands with me. So the title of your talk you gave, I want to share with folks. It's, it was, yes, you can quit high school and everything will turn out, okay, Blake, could this be true?


Blake Boles  11:22  
Well, I'm biased. I think so. I think it is. I can't promise that it will be true for your kid or anyone's particular kid, because high school means a lot of different things to a lot of different people. But what I get into in the talk is saying, if your kid clearly is struggling, but not just struggling like, you know, can't get an A instead is getting B's. It's more like has declining mental health is it's not making friends. Is feeling like life is very pointless, is feeling extremely bored. This is all a situation that that doesn't have to be. And there are all these cool alternatives to school out there that range from radically alternative like the democratic free schools, where there is no curriculum, kind of kids get to run the show they have an equal vote, to adults and all matters of substance in the school. Or you could have radical unschooling, which is where you're not just homeschooling, but you are. You are homeschooling without any curriculum the child is driving the process, it's completely interest led, parent facilitated learning, or you can dial it back a bit, and there are various private and public options that just give your kid a little bit more choice, a little bit more flexibility. It kind of takes some of the pressure off, and those are great too. Not every kid needs complete and absolute freedom to design their own learning experiences. And a lot of kids, they'll cycle through different levels of of self directedness. And so for a little while, you know, being homeschooled with a curriculum might be the right thing. For a little while, unschooling without a curriculum might be it. And then they might, you know, really want to be around a group of peers, and so going to an alternative school or a self directed learning center becomes the right thing. And so yes, you can quit school and you need to replace it with something else. And there are this entire ecosystem of choices out there, and very few of us know about them, or we instantly stereotype them into, you know, homeschooling equals they don't, they don't know anything about the world, and they're unsocialized. Or alternative school equals, well, it's a private school, so therefore it must just be for for rich to privileged kids. And it's, it's, it's so much better than that. We are, we are living in the best time and place in North America ever in the history of history, to have alternatives to mainstream school and alternatives that still lead kids to college and career and normal, functional, self sufficient adulthood. I


Ethan Sawyer  13:51  
want to follow up. Why is this the best time ever for students and parents to be considering bringing more self directed learning into their lives.


Blake Boles  14:02  
So you can just compare what we have right now in the United States or Canada or a couple other countries that are really great examples to what we have in other countries at the same moment in history and in other countries, homeschooling is often not legal, or it's ambiguously legal, or it is legal, but just not many people do it, and so it's not really a great option beyond having very young children where kind of every parent is a homeschooler by default. And so your choices then become public school or private school, and private school is usually a lot like public school and the sense of what they do, and it just costs a lot more money. And so this is really, if the public school is not a great option, this is just, there's no good way out here. And so what we have in the US is we don't just have public schools and then private schools that look a lot like public schools and cost more money. We do have those, but we have more than that. We have this whole array of schools that are less conventional. Know, ranging to the to the radically unconventional. And a lot of these schools do not charge 25, or $30,000 a year. They charge something closer to five or $10,000 a year, and they have sliding scale tuitions because the people who start these alternative schools are extremely generous and and, you know, they should be charging more money, but they're not, because they care about accessibility. And in addition to that, we have homeschooling as free and legal options in every single state in the US, in every province in Canada and many other countries as well. And this only happened in 1993 there was this coalition of fundamentalist Christians, and then back to the land hippie parents that came together in the 70s and 80s to fought, and they fought state by state to make homeschooling legal. So now you can go live anywhere in the US, and you can file paperwork with your it depends on what state you're in, but you can very easily choose to homeschool. You pay nothing, you'll face a small amount of oversight, depending on where you are. If you're in like New York State, your kid will have to take a basic standardized test every few years to make sure they're not completely inept. I think they have to score above the 33rd percentile. And then in other states, like California or Texas, there's no requirements whatsoever. You literally can do whatever you you want with your kid. And that's, that's a wonderful freedom. A lot of people are kind of scared of that because they think of how it can be abused. And that's, that's a reasonable thing to be afraid of. But by and large, again, I haven't seen some great crisis of parents abusing their homeschooling freedoms. And so that's why we're in the best place, and we're in the best time, because there's, there's a plethora of options, and you don't have to pay a lot of money to participate in the world of alternative education,


Ethan Sawyer  16:48  
like who can benefit from self directed learning. I was


Blake Boles  16:52  
just talking about this with a friend here in New York the other day. It's kids who are not that interested in playing, pardon my French, but like stupid bullshit hierarchy, social hierarchy games like the popularity games of school, where it doesn't matter, doesn't matter what you're doing, as long as you're on top of everyone else. The kids who I think, gravitate towards team sports are generally not the ones who become unschoolers? So I think, yeah, there's a certain level of like being weird, being, you know, a freak or a geek, that leads kids to go in this direction of alternative education. But also it's the kids who are really genuine about learning, and they want to learn. They want to build skills. And unfortunately, that's not the culture that is present in most schools, and especially in middle and high schools. Learning is not taken seriously if you prioritize learning, that is a liability to your social standing in that school. And so there's a lot of kids who are just like, I want to do real stuff. I don't want to wait, I don't want to play these ridiculous games. And so how do I do that now? How do I do that without waiting until I'm 18, and those are the kids who end up in these alternative paths? Yeah,


Ethan Sawyer  18:09  
the things that are pinging as you're sharing are things about, like, you know, building skills. And you didn't quite say this, but this is kind of what I bring, is like, you know, connecting to their values, or figuring out what their values are, right? And, you know, exploring their curiosity, all things that humans should be doing in life. And what I hear you saying is like, there are ways in which the traditional education system is not necessarily the best way to help us, to help students do these kinds of things, and there are other ways of doing it. And what I'm also holding in my head is that there are probably some folks listening and going like, well, but for whatever reason, you know circumstances, or you know life, I can't homeschool my kid, or I my, you know, my as a student listening, I can imagine saying, Well, I can't go to I can't homeschool. Will I'd love to hear because what I'm hearing also is that self directed learning isn't just for homeschoolers, that there are actually some principles and some things that we can learn that are applicable to other folks. Am I? Am I right in that


Blake Boles  19:07  
definitely and to quickly respond to many parents who say, I can't homeschool because, you know, both of us work, or I'm a single parent, or just no one is around. That's where self directed learning centers in alternative schools enter the picture. That's the way that your kid can do something that's way more personalized for them, that's way less stress, less anxiety, and be around a large group of their peers, and they're out there. Go, go Google, the Sudbury schools, the Agile learning centers, the Liberated Learning Centers, democratic free schools, there's lots of them. So it's not about homeschooling, per se. It's about it's about finding something that gives your kid some real autonomy and choice. And there's many different ways to do that, from school to unschooling.


Ethan Sawyer  19:50  
Share with us some ways that whether folks decide to go an alternative education route or not, how can we all be. More self directed learners.


Blake Boles  20:03  
So one of the things that that came up for me, that I've already shared, is that it's about learning by consent, and so this is applicable to adults also, and consent is this idea that most people wholeheartedly accept. When we're talking about the medical profession, you know you don't want someone to just do surgery on you while you're unconscious. You want, you want to offer consent. You you want consent in your relationships. You know, if you have a child, you want to make sure that that they know what healthy consent looks like. If you have a partner, a spouse, you know, you of course, want that to be a consensual relationship. And systems of governance, we don't we want to be represented. So consent is this like broadly appealing concept, until we get into the realm of of education, where somehow we think it's okay to throw it out and you can't give kids a meaningful choice in how they spent 12 or more years of their life. And yet, this is something that we do understand as adults, and so that's that's more about taking something that you understand as an adult and bringing it into the life of your children.


Ethan Sawyer  21:10  
And I'd love to hear some examples. So give me an example, and let's do maybe one inside the classroom and outside the class. So what is a non consensual learning experience? And this may be obvious for folks, but I want to do that, and then I'd also love to do it in terms of, like the parent perspective. So not only you know, how do teachers, non consensually teach, but also, what are some alternatives in terms of the parents can be using with their


Blake Boles  21:32  
children? Sure. So I think a common example outside of the classroom is sports and also music and and so if you want your kid to take a music lesson, you will figure out, okay, hey, would you like to try piano or guitar, or, I don't know, samba drama, just making up stuff now, and you give your kid options, you say, Hey, how about you try it for this amount of time? You know, I will, I will be on your team. I will invest in some lessons. I will maybe get you a an instrument, or I will support you in being part of this band. And then you let your kid try it. You encourage them to try it for a reasonable amount of time so they've given it a real chance. And then you ask them, Hey, do you want to keep doing this? And then you respect their answer, whether it's yes or no. And this is how we treat music. This is how we treat sports teams. You know, outside of the most you know fanatical parents who say you must play the violin or you must be on the football team. That's not a non consensual way to to approach those topics within schooling. Or to give an example where, where a parent you know has a choice about about helping their kid approach education consensually or non consensually, I'd say that first of all, there's a huge, you know, chasm in between K through 12 schooling and college. You know, higher education schooling, because college is by by choice. No one is being forced to go to college, whereas we have compulsory schooling laws for for kids up through age 16. And so I think that this is why the the K through 12 system is, is, you know, perpetually in a state of crisis. You know, when has it never been in a state of crisis? I don't know. And, and why higher education, while it has its own, you know, unique problems and challenges, is not, you know, considered to be in perpetual crisis. In fact, people from all over the world come to America to participate in our higher education system. And I think the you know, just the most basic differences, you choose to go to college and you don't choose to go through K through 12.


Ethan Sawyer  23:34  
Great. So what are some other ways that we can become more self directed learners and or inspire our students to be more self directed learners.


Blake Boles  23:43  
Something that a lot of people are aware of already in the realm of psychology, is this concept of intrinsic motivation. You know, I'm sure any educator has heard of this, and because it's a basic and important idea, you know, people can do things for their own sake, that's intrinsic motivation, or they can do things because they want to get a reward, or they're they're afraid of a punishment. That's something you do out of intrinsic motivation. And the basic ingredients that go into intrinsic motivation are autonomy, which means having a sense of choice, having options, mastery, which is the ability to go deep into something to develop some real skills. And the last one is relatedness, which you can kind of think of as community or purpose, a sense of belonging. And those three ingredients are what you know, can inspire someone, what will provide the raw materials for someone to work on something completely for everyone's sake, including something very difficult. You know, we ask ourselves, how do people, you know, who are doing these crazy PhD programs in some super esoteric fields, you know, how do they motivate themselves to get up and go to a library and pore over all these books? You know, it's not because they're going to go and make a bunch of. Of money. Let's imagine this is like a liberal arts BHT, okay, it's not because it's for the money. It's not because it's for the glory. You know, there's something that's happening there that has to do with them having a sense of freedom and choice, them getting really, really good at something, because that feels good to everyone. We we've when we've sensed, you know, I think it was Nietzsche who said, no happiness is feeling your power increase, and that can be power in the form of of knowledge and talent, and then finally, feeling like you're a member of some sort of community. It could be like an academic community, in this sense, a community of scholars. That's what motivates someone to get up and and just pour over dense texts in the library for 12 hours and then try to write some horribly long dissertation. And so we have to be asking ourselves, How do we provide these ingredients of intrinsic motivation in the educational environments for our kids? And all it takes is a cursory look to say that most school situations, outside of some some nice outliers, most school situations don't give kids much autonomy. They don't give kids a chance to go deep into a skill. They're forced to stay at the surface level and just learn a tiny bit about everything. And then you have to move on to the next thing. And then finally, you know, a good school will have a sense of community. It will feel like you have a purpose for being there. I didn't have that experience in my you know, relatively well funded public school growing up in Bakersfield, California. The only reason we were there is because we all lived in the same geographic, you know, the same zip codes, and there was no real sense of togetherness. And it was nothing like what I felt when I went to a summer camp. It's nothing like what I felt when I went off to college and I met other people who were studying the same things or who shared my same interests. And so I really, I think summer camps in particular are a wonderful model of how you can take a kid who might seem lazy or unmotivated in some other context, and you take that same kid and you put them into this new context, and they will work really hard on something, and often surprise their parents in you know, how dedicated they become, they became, and it's simply, you know, intrinsic motivation explains it right there, and that ties in with with our sense of what discipline is also. So I'm reading


Ethan Sawyer  27:17  
your book last night, and one thing that jumped out at me that I'd love for you to share a little bit about is the Google everything part. Why should students Google everything?


Blake Boles  27:27  
Yeah, I think that in our collective adult anxiety about smartphones and the Internet and the YouTube algorithm whole I think that it's really easy to just say, You know what? I grew up without technology, and I turned out fine, and so put your damn phone away and and you don't need it for learning. And I'm like, no, no, we've already lost this battle, and the technology is here to stay, and we need to go the other direction and embrace it. Because, you know, to Google is something is to tap this, this collective, outsourced hive mind, which is, which is the future? You know that we are there already, and we shouldn't be. We shouldn't be, kind of hate myself for saying it this way. We shouldn't be preparing our kids for a future where, where information is considered scarce, which is the most you know, most of history. And one of my favorite authors who has written about this is Will Richardson, who's a former public school teacher and administrator now he does a lot of teacher training stuff, and he has argued in his writings for not just having open book tests. So we're talking about still the realm of conventional school. He's trying to get conventional schools to become a little bit more self directed. He says, we don't just need open book tests. We know. We need open phone tests. You know, let your the kids have their phones and Google the answers. And essentially, if a kid can easily cheat and game your test, the test that you're given as a teacher with their phone, you have not created a high enough quality test. Yeah, you know, that is the new bar. I think that's freaking genius. And yes, yeah. So, oh yes. I'm so


Ethan Sawyer  29:10  
excited to show I want to jump in and interrupt for a second and say that I went to this talk recently where the guy was sharing Wolf from alpha, and he was saying, you know, we've, we've basically technologies evolved. Such that we're our education system is so far behind, and if we just caught up and started to change in the way that we're thinking, like, you don't need to, like, actually learn to memorize all these formulas. If you've got something like Wolfram Alpha, where you can just type it in and it's not only going to tell you what the answer is, it's going to tell you it's going to show all the work. And so what we need to be teaching is, like teaching students, and this is what I hear you're getting at, is like, how to find the information they're looking for. And it may, yes, maybe we could test for that, but maybe that's, I don't know, is that the most interesting


Blake Boles  29:48  
test, and what you just said, connects to what a lot of kind of mainstream economist literature is now saying about the future of jobs and the future of work. One of my favorite writers. Is Tyler Cohen, and his book averages over essentially says, Okay, there's this big difference between, you know, people who are still earning essentially the same median wage adjusted for inflation that that they did in the 1970s and then the people who are making gobs more money. And he said the difference between these two broad groups of people is that one knows how to work with with computers and software and smart machines. It's like, they work with the machines and the other one is competing against the machines, and he says, it's only going to go one direction here. You have to learn how to work with the machines. And so what you just said about Wolfram Alpha is, is, that's a great point. It's like, do we have to learn how to do all these, these math equations in a very, you know, 18th century manner, when you can have a computer do them for you. And a lot of people say, but what if the computer doesn't doesn't work anymore? It's like, Yes, true. And if a lot of other things fail in our civilization, we're going to be screwed also. But assuming that that we can continue pushing forward then, then that's the next level. You don't do something that a computer can do for you like to prepare kids to think in a way that we're that they are competing with with software they're competing with smart machines. Is just


Ethan Sawyer  31:15  
economic, you know? Sabotage, yeah, and it's for everyone involved, and students don't have to do this alone, right? It's not like it's the student alone with the machine, right? They're harnessing the power to like, reach out to your point earlier, to community and create larger communities, and using technology is making that easier than ever. Talk to me about why students should email strangers.


Blake Boles  31:38  
Emailing strangers is the compliment to googling everything, learning how to Google, how to use search terms, how to find all that static information that's out there on the internet is super important. But there's all this other information which is locked up in people's brains, information about the direction that a certain job industry is going, how you work through a certain problem in a certain field. There's all this stuff that you can't google, and that's why you need to be part of the the social world and but what happens with I guess, the assumption that we have with school is that kids can only hang around other kids their age plus or minus a couple years, and it's not appropriate for kids to be communicating with adults. I call bullshit on that. I think that that kids have always been interested in what adults are doing, and right now, they're the most close off from from the adult world that they've ever been in history. There's just no easy way for young people nowadays to get exposed to what adults are doing in their day to day life, and for many of many different reasons, some of them involving liability, some of them involving the fact that it's a lot of knowledge work. Now, instead of hands on work, which easily lends itself to apprenticeships, but emailing a stranger is a way that a teenager can quickly get a view into the world of work. And I think that that's what teenagers are largely interested in they do want to become effective. Adults


Ethan Sawyer  33:03  
talk to me about nerd clans.


Blake Boles  33:07  
This is a pretty basic one. I think that you you cannot be expected to form instant or tight relationships with people just because you are thrown in a common jail cell with them, and, sorry if that's a strong analogy, but I think that's essentially what's going on in school, or at least that's how it feels to a lot of students. And instead, people, they form deep bonds when they're allowed to, to form affinity groups, when they when they center around interests. You know, even that's, I think, the power of sports teams. Again, it's consensual, and so I don't have almost any friends that remain from high school. I have a number of good friends that have come from my college years. And I think by far my closest friends and my most numerous friends have come from the worlds of summer camp, because I've, I've spent a lot of time working at these two different summer camps and the world of education. And I think this is what a lot of adults, you know, eventually realizes, you need some common ground with other people. And so this is what I mean by by nerd clans. You just need to find the other people who are really nerdy about the things that you're nerdy about, and that's where you you form tight connections. That's where you feel that sense of belonging, that sense of purpose, which is important for intrinsic motivation.


Ethan Sawyer  34:31  
So your other book is better than college, how to build a successful life without a four year degree. Now I love that you're that we're bringing this onto this podcast, which is all about extensively, getting into college and going to college, is it possible to build a successful life without a four year degree? I know it's kind of a layup question, but, but talk to me about this.


Blake Boles  34:49  
Yes, Ethan, it is possible. And a lot of the young people who end up choosing, like very purposefully choosing, not to do a four year program in my ops. Innovation are those with interests in the arts, in the skilled trades, in tech entrepreneurship, those who really want to travel, and they want to do a gap year, or maybe two gap years, and get some real world experience, and then they might even go back, and they will continue to do higher education and end up with a degree just a little bit later than normal. And so that book is mostly about questioning the unquestioned, the almost secular, religious path that we have nowadays, towards towards salvation, so to speak, which is getting a four year degree, and perhaps even you know, more degrees beyond that. And so I profiled a lot of young people who did grow up alternatively educated, homeschooled, unschooled, alternatively schooled, and, and they went on to do what a lot of parents just think is the nightmare scenario. They didn't get a high school diploma, and they chose not to go to college. It's like they just must, must be complete screw ups, right? And, and, no, I that in the book. I explain through both stories and through and through, you know, facts and figures. Why that's not the case, why the arguments that we commonly hear for the the value of a four year degree can be extremely skewed, even if they're they're correct in the aggregate, and why, you know, those numbers really shouldn't affect an individual's decision to the extent that we have, we have Let them guide individual decisions, and this is all way, way more salient when we're talking about a young person who's going to take on student loan debt. So I'm one of those lucky people who went to a really high quality public university before all the tuition hikes around the recession. And so, you know, I was paying about $8,000 a year for tuition at UC Berkeley, and plus room and board experience expenses and and I had a parent who could pay for that outright. And so, certainly lucky, certainly privileged in that sense, and that takes a lot of the pressure off if you don't have to consider debt. This is all so much more amplified if you were a typical student who's looking at typical levels of student loan debt, which is somewhere on the order of $100,000 after all is said and done.


Ethan Sawyer  37:17  
So what are some good reasons to either skip college, or, let me say, take a year off, potentially and take a gap year.


Blake Boles  37:27  
There's a book that was published in 2018 that I think really dives into this question in a way that I never could. The book is called The Case Against education by The Economist Brian Kaplan. And essentially, he takes all of the numbers about the return on investment if a college degree, and he parses them to like the tiniest level of detail, and he takes into account a lot of stuff that we don't talk about, which is, you know, when we say a college graduate earns a lot more money, to what extent is, does that reflect just the pre existing? You know, let's say to choose one statistic only, like intellectual talent, the IQ of of that person beforehand. You know, someone who can get into Harvard but chooses not to go to Harvard is in all likelihood still going to do very well in the marketplace. And so you have to take out that ability bias. First, you have to consider the fact that that that parental resources, you know, money, wealth, that is a huge skewing factor. Also, you have to take into account the desired major, because just to choose, you know, the most extreme polar opposites here, if you're going to major in petroleum engineering, you're going to make so much more money than an early childhood education person. That's just I even read a recent article saying that that study majoring in early childhood education will actually cause you a net loss in your future earnings compared to just having a high school diploma, considering the cost of college that you will incur along the way, horrible, surprising statistic. And so that book can really dive into it. And just to give you the top level recommendations that came out of that book, which is based on a bunch of peer reviewed literature, it's not that surprising, actually. It's if you're an extremely, kind of motivated student in the in the realm of academics, and you're planning to go into the realm of academics, then you should probably go to college. I know that kind of sounds like a tautology. It doesn't really mean anything, but you should be, like, wildly enthusiastic about the prospect of spending a lot of time with books, discussing ideas, working with abstractions, and writing papers. I'm talking about, you know, the general four year liberal arts path here. And to maybe bring this down to another level, the author Derek Sievers has this, this great, you know, decision making. Matrix, he said there's, there's yes, there's no and there's hell yes. And in this case, you don't want your college decision to just be a yes or no decision. You should actually probably stick to no as your default decision until you find that situation which is a hell yes and, and so that's, that's, you know, I guess, kind of easy advice to follow, but you have to be able to parse your expectations and desires for college, from your parents, expectations and desires and the larger cultures, expectations and desires and this giant, you know, incoming wave, which is your peer group, which is, you know, all these other people around your age who are also going to college, and they're also talking about, you know, whatever the US News and World Report ranking of the schools they're going to. These are all extremely hard things to figure out and to differentiate when you're 18 years old and and so essentially, if you are unclear about why you're going to college or why you are choosing to study the thing you are studying, there's a very good case to be made for waiting


Ethan Sawyer  41:09  
a question that's popping up for me as I imagine being 16 years old and hearing you say, hey, separate your thoughts and feelings about college from your parents, from societies. It makes me go, if I'm a 16 year old, like, how do I do that? Like, how do I know that I'm making a decision that's for me and not based on these because I imagine that it feels blended for a lot of folks. How do I how does the student know? Is there, like, a practical way, are there questions that students can ask?


Blake Boles  41:38  
It's hard, it's so hard, it's there's no easy way to get out of this trap. And I think that that people who do choose alternatives to conventional school are much better equipped to do that kind of thinking, because they can see that, oh my god, I'm not doing what all the other you know kids my age are doing, and I still seem to be doing fine. I'm not a complete screw up. And so I think that helps. But again, not many young people are taking alternatives to the conventional path, and so reading, obviously, is one way to do it, but most kids are so busy with school work and homework that there's not much time left over for that, especially after Minecraft and Fortnite investments have been made. So I don't have a good answer for that one. Ethan. I don't know if anyone does. The one takeaway I can imagine offering at this moment is talking really seriously about the economics of student loans with your kid, and not brushing that over, not saying, Well, it's an it's an investment in education, therefore it's always a good investment. That's bullshit. And if you're telling your kids that you are potentially setting them up for for a real crap situation, as, you know, in their 20s and and so it's worth looking into books like, like Brian Kaplan's the case against education. It's worth, you know, looking at alternative college ranking systems. The alternative to us, News and World Report, there's, there's lots of good alternatives. And it's worth looking at the crazy little colleges that that don't make the headlines, you know, the the little you know, private liberal arts schools, the ones that are that are super small and and you know, only take 200 people. There's even, there's even smaller ones. I have a friend in Portland who's starting, who has started a two year college called the way finding Academy, and they're trying to flip the college experience and and I couldn't even get into the details about that. I interviewed the director on my own podcast. But there are all these little alternatives in the realm of higher education to the big, well known public state universities and the Ivy Leagues, in the same way that there are many alternatives that most people don't know about in the realm of K to 12. This


Ethan Sawyer  43:52  
is awesome. I want to flag a couple things. One, if you're hearing Blake talk about us, News and World Report rankings, and you haven't heard my other podcasts where I've talked about those. If you just google your annual reminder to ignore the US News and World Report rankings, there's a good article on that. And if you're interested in some of those other possibilities, I'm just going to cross reference one of my podcasts with the one with Maria Furtado on colleges that change lives. There are a lot of cool other schools there. And Blake, will you just if you can remember the name of the podcast, so that when folks search for it, of the way finding interview, do you remember the name of it or the title of it?


Blake Boles  44:33  
Yeah, the interview is with Michelle Jones, and the school is called the way finding Academy in Portland, Oregon.


Ethan Sawyer  44:39  
Great. We'll link to that. So I'm a huge resource junkie, and I love I know that you like resources, and you have a bunch of them, like, will you point folks to some of your favorite resources, for students, for counselors, for parents who are maybe excited about interested in what you've shared so far, and, you know, interested in learning more.


Blake Boles  44:59  
I. Be happy to it's a good thing we prepared some show notes for this purpose. It's a good


Ethan Sawyer  45:03  
thing we did. And feel free to, feel free to jump around on these. You don't have to say them all. And folks, you don't have to write these down again. On the show notes page, you can find these. So, yeah, just maybe just highlight a few of these that you feel like are particularly, you know, ones that folks shouldn't miss.


Blake Boles  45:18  
Sure. Well, I'll start by beating my own drum and saying that my podcast off trail learning, we are, you know, more than 50 episodes deep now. And I do long form interviews, kind of like you and I are doing with people in the world of alternative education, sometimes educators, parents, sometimes young people. And a couple of my favorite episodes I recently had Ned Johnson, who's one of the authors of the book The self driven child, which is also one of my favorite recent books about it's not quite telling you to go to do all the radical alternatives. It's just saying, Hey, this is how your kids motivational system works. And let's just look at how this interacts with school. They don't connect the dots as directly as I wish they would, but it's still a great kind of entry level book for parents who are starting to think differently about school. And so again, the self driven child, that's the book. And I also interviewed Ned on my podcast. And maybe one other favorite recent episode that I've done, I interviewed Peter Gray from Boston College, who has a popular book and a TED talk about the importance of play, of unstructured childhood play. And I talk with him about the evidence for self directed learning, essentially, is this field, you know, these alternative schools, unschooling, homeschooling? Is this just something that that that privilege people do, and they can afford to do it because their kids kind of can become screw ups, and it doesn't matter, because they have safety nets anyway, or is there evidence that this is something that that really works, that kids go on to, you know, career and college and all the stuff that we normally want for them? And he is one of the biggest authorities in the field who's done primary research on this question. And so we dive into how much evidence is there for all this stuff? You know, real scientific evidence. Oh, what else? There's so many books out there. I mean, John Taylor Gatto, he he passed away recently, and he left a number of great books. His most popular one is dumbing us down. The book that I got into in college was called a different kind of teacher that one's a little bit more out of print. If you can find it on Amazon, it's your lucky day. Another book is written by my friend Grace Llewellyn. She wrote the teenage liberation handbook, and that was published back in 93 and it's written directly for teenagers. And she inspired me to write directly for young people, also in my first and second books. And this is just like pure like, like fire bottled up in the form of a book that tells teenagers, you know, you don't have to put up with this, this bullshit you can there's a whole world out there waiting for you, and you can enter it tomorrow. And whenever I reread it, I still fall in love with it over and over again. And let's see. One more book that came out recently I'd like to highlight is it's the book unschooled by Carrie McDonald, who is it's an unschooling mom. And it's not actually just about unschooling. It's a great introduction to the whole world of alternative education. And so if you were trying to to figure out, you know, what are my options to try to get your bearings, I recommend you pick up that book. Let's see a few blogs that I like I already mentioned. Will Richardson, he's got a blog and some some books that are excellent. And then one other blogger, who's a bit controversial, a bit kind of classic is, is Penelope trunk, and she is an unschooling mom. Her kids are pretty much current up now, but she is a prolific blogger, and she she writes stuff without a filter, and she says stuff that no other you know, homeschooling mom blogger will say, and sometimes she ruffles feathers because of it, but I think more often, she is spot on, and she is especially good discussing the question of video games and screen time, and she advocates for unlimited video games and YouTube. And so, you know, just, just go onto her site and search for those articles, and she'll take you on a roller coaster. I love her for that. A few other books that have really shaped me. Excellent sheep by William deresowitz, which is all about the college admissions game. It makes the best case I've ever read for doing an unspecialized four year liberal arts degree. The book the nurture assumption, by Judith Rich Harris, which argues that parents are way less influential on the outcomes of their kids than they think that's a great way to learn how to like relax and step back and stop being so controlling. There's a new organization, it's a few years old now, called the Alliance for self directed education, and they are making a real effort to bring together all these different players in the world of self directed learning. And and alternative schools. And so they have a great resource, and they have a great online magazine too. There's a couple summer camps. And so not back to school camp is the one I've spent the most time working with. That's that started by Grace Llewellyn, who wrote the teenage liberation handbook. If you have a teenage homeschooler or unschooler, that is pretty much the place you want to be. You know, each August or September is not back to school camp like you meet the coolest other teenagers, and it's, I could spend a whole episode just talking about that camp. And then there's another one, which is great for a little bit younger kids. I think they have team programs also called Camp stomping ground, and that's out of New York State. There's homeschooling conferences, there's non schooling conferences. And a few more of my own things include my company on school adventures. We've been leading long international trips for teenagers that happened during the school year. So anyone is allowed to sign up, but you know, it's more convenient if you're a self directed learner. And so I've taken groups to Nepal, Spain, Argentina, New Zealand, Southeast Asia, all over the place, and I'm scheming an around the world trip for early 2020 that I'll personally lead.


Ethan Sawyer  51:12  
Blake, what are you most excited about when you think about the future of self directed learning?


Blake Boles  51:18  
That's a great question, and that's not an easy question either. What excites me is that I think we're going to be going in this direction, whether we like it or not. I think that that technology and economic forces are actually the main drivers of of what we now call self directed education. So for example, why did homeschooling have this resurgence in the 90s and the early 2000s I think it's largely due to the internet. I don't think there was, you know, another equally powerful force that was responsible for these millions of homeschoolers, kind of appearing out of thin air. And I think that that we're going to continue going in that direction, especially with an economy that demands more creative thinking, more knowledge work. This is the standard, you know, 21st century skills argument and and I think schools will reluctantly come along, kind of dragging under their, their heavy weight and then their, their bloated bureaucracy. But they will, they will slowly move in that direction, while surrounding those, those kind of dinosaur schools, there's this, you know, these agile little, little Mavericks. And those are the little schools or learning centers or homeschooling co ops, or, you know, world schoolers. Those are the ones that I like to highlight and champion it and be the cheerleader for. And so I feel like it's an exciting time, because we have the momentum of history behind us, and and whether you like it or not, it's going to be a self directed future, and we're only getting started. Blake, thanks for coming on the podcast. Ethan, it's been a pleasure.


Ethan Sawyer  53:02  
Hi. Your hand is cramped from writing down all the resources that Blake just mentioned, don't worry, because you'll find them as always on the show notes page. That's college sa guy.com/podcasts with even convenient links. Fun fact, you can sign up for Blake's newsletter on his website, Blake bowls.com and get a free audio book edition of his book, The Art of self directed learning, as if you didn't already have enough action items. From this episode. On our next episode, I interview another advocate in the education world. He is Shane winmeier, the founder and executive director of Campus pride, the nation's leading LGBTQ organization for student and campus organizations working to build future leaders and create safer campus communities. Hey, ever left a review of this podcast? If not, I'd really appreciate it. It helps me share this stuff with more folks. You can do it at college. Sa guy.com/podcast because my friend Giovanni would say, be easy. Y'all you.


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