You don't need college to learn stuff, OK?
Everything is available basically for free.
You can learn anything you want for free.
It is not a question of learning.
There is a value that colleges have, which is like seeing whether somebody's Can somebody work hard at something, including a bunch of sort of annoying homework assignments, and still do their homework assignments and soldier through and get it done.
That's the main value of college.
You probably want to hang around with a bunch of people your own age for a while, instead of going right into the workforce.
I think colleges are basically for fun and to prove you can do your chores, but they're not for learning.
But there is a requirement of evidence of exceptional ability.
If you're trying to do something exceptional, they must have evidence of exceptional ability.
I don't consider going to college evidence of exceptional ability.
In fact, ideally, you dropped out and did something.
I mean, obviously, you know, look at, like, you know, Gates is a pretty smart guy.
He dropped out.
Jobs, pretty smart.
He dropped out.
You know, Larry Ellison, smart guy.
He dropped out.
Like, obviously not needed.
Generally, you want education to be as close to a video game as possible, like a good video game.
You do not need to tell your kid to play video games.
They will play video games on autopilot all day.
So if you can make it interactive and engaging, then you can make education far more compelling and far easier to do.
So you really want to disconnect the whole grade level thing from the subjects.
Allow people to progress at the fastest pace that they can or are interested in in each subject.
It seems like a really obvious thing.
I mean, I think, like most teaching today is a lot like vaudeville where and as a result, just not that compelling.
It's like somebody standing up there and lecturing to you and they've done the same lecture several years in a row.
They're not necessarily all that engaged in doing it.
Do you agree with Peter Thiel about the unnecessariness of university, higher education?
A university education is often unnecessary.
That's not to say it's unnecessary for all people, but I think you probably learn about as much, or the vast majority of what you're going to learn there, in the first two years, and most of it is from your classmates.
Now for a lot of companies.
They do want to see the completion of the degree because they're looking for someone who's going to persevere and see it through to the end.
And that's actually what's important to them.
So it really depends on what somebody's goal is.
If the goal is to start a company, I would say no point in finishing college.
So I think that's how it should be.
And it shouldn't be that you've got like these grades where people move in lockstep.
And so everyone goes through, you know, goes like normally.
You know we'll go through English math, science and so forth from like fifth grade to sixth grade to seventh grade, like it's an assembly line.
But people are not objects on an assembly line.
That's a ridiculous notion.
So how would you educate your five boys?
Actually, I created a little school.
What kind of school?
Could you describe to us?
Sure.
I mean, it's small.
It's only got 14 kids now, and it'll have 20 kids in September.
It's called Ad Astra, which means to the stars.
That's maybe a bit different from most other schools, is that there aren't any grades.
There's no grade 1, grade 2, grade 3 type of thing.
I'm making all the children go in the same grade at the same time, like an assembly line.
You know, because some people love English or languages, some people love math, some people love music and and different abilities different times, it makes more sense to cater the education to match their aptitudes and abilities.
I think that's one principle.
Another is that it's important to teach, teach problem-solving, or teach to the problem, not to the tools.
So this would be like, Let's say, you're trying to teach people about how engines work.
A more traditional approach would be to say well, we're going to teach you all about screwdrivers and wrenches and you're going to have a course on screwdrivers, a course on wrenches and all these things.
This is a very difficult way to do it.
A much better way would be like here's the engine.
Now Let's take it apart.
How are we going to take it apart?
Oh, you need a screwdriver That's what the screwdriver is for you need a wrench.
That's what the wrench is for, And then a very important thing happens, which is that the relevance of the tools, because it seems to be going pretty well.
I mean that the kids really love going to school.
I think that's a good sign You know, I mean I hated going to school when I was a kid.
It was torture so the fact that they Like they actually think vacations are too long.
Like they want to go back to school.
Wow.
Yeah, exactly.
That's weird.
I know.
If you're like, what is education?
Like you're basically downloading data and algorithms into your brain.
And it's actually... amazingly bad in conventional education.
Because it shouldn't be this huge chore.
The more you can gamify the process of learning, the better.
And I think, unfortunately, a lot of education is very board-villian.
You've got someone standing up there kind of lecturing at people and they've done the same lecture 20 years in a row and they're not very excited about it.
And that lack of enthusiasm is conveyed to the students that they're not very excited about it.
They don't know why they're there.
Like, why are we learning this stuff?
We don't even know why.
In fact, I think a lot of things that people learn, probably there's no point in learning them because they never use them in the future.
