Unschooling

A recent issue of the New Yorker had an intriguing profile of Paypal founder Peter Thiel. Thiel’s current obsession is education”

“Thiel believes that education is the next bubble in the U.S. economy. He has compared university administrators to subprime-mortgage brokers, and called debt-saddled graduates the last indentured workers in the developed world, unable to free themselves even through bankruptcy. Nowhere is the blind complacency of the establishment more evident than in its bovine attitude toward academic degrees: as long as my child goes to the right schools, upward mobility will continue. A university education has become a very expensive insurance policy—proof, Thiel argues, that true innovation has stalled. In the midst of economic stagnation, education has become a status game, ‘purely positional and extremely decoupled’ from the question of its benefit to the individual and society.”

He “thinks that young people—especially the most talented ones—should establish a plan for their lives early, and he favors one plan in particular: starting a technology company,” and so he is “giving fellowships to brilliant young people who would leave college and launch their own startups.”