약 500년 전 9월 31일 마틴 루터는 교회의 잘못에 항의하기 위한 반박문을 교회 문에 못 박았다. 우리 역시 대학과 학교의 문에 우리의 반박문을 못 박을 것이다.

새로운 95개조 반박문

1. 미국에서의 삶은 13년이라는 의무적인 최소 형량(*K-12)으로 시작된다. *K-12 : 미국에서 유치원에서부터 고등학교를 졸업할 때까지의 교육기간.

2. 대학 입학 위원회가 보상과 처벌 시스템을 구축했다는 사실을 기억해라.

3. 높은 교육열은 천국과 지옥, 구원과 저주로 완성된 미국의 국가 종교가 되었다. 당신은 승자인가 죄인인가. 예일 대학인가 감옥인가.

4. “프린스턴 대학에서 교육 받지 않고 졸업장 갖기 vs 졸업장 없이 프린스턴 대학 교육 받기. 대답이 바로 나오지 않으면 진지하게 다시 생각해봐야한다. — 경제학자 브라이언 캐플런

5. 미국에는 5,300여 개의 대학교가 있지만 왜 한 가지 관점만 존재하나?

6. 자유를 가져야 한다. 신념을 가진 유일한 사람이 되기 위해.. ‍

7. 위험한 생각 없이는 안전은 있을 수 없다.

8. 존경할 만한 것은 독창적이지 않다. ‍
9. 가장 흥미로운 것은 이론이 아니라 실제로 작동하는 것이다. ‍
10. 누가 입학할 수 있는지 결정하는 데 대부분의 시간을 쓰는 집단을 조심하라. ‍

11. 하버드는 10배 이상의 학생들을 입학시킬 수 있고 다른 지역에 10개의 캠퍼스를 더 열 수 있지만 그렇게 하지 않는다. 엘리트 학교들은 브랜드 가치를 떨어뜨리는 것을 두려워한다. 그들은 교육이 아닌 명품 시계 사업을 하고 있다.

12. 하버드는 세계에서 가장 부유하고 가장 오래되고 가장 강력한 헤지 펀드로 총 운용 자산(AUM)이 380억 달러이다. 또한 세금 감면을 목적으로 아이들로 가득 찬 비영리 부동산 회사이다. 그들이 워렌 버핏처럼 사업을 운영한다면과세를 해야한다. ‍

13. 미국의 총 학자금 대출 부채는 현재 1조 5천억 달러 이상이다. (한국 2019년 학자금 대출 1조 8322억원)

14. 감옥의 설계자가 고등학교의 설계자라는 것은 우연이 아니다.

15. 정부의 힘이 모든 사람이 같은 나이에, 같은 속도로, 같은 장소에서, 같은 방법으로, 같은 것을 배우도록 강요하는 데 사용되어서는 안 된다.

16. 고등학교 : 스페인어 수업에서 4년 동안 “me gusta”를 반복하지만 여전히 스페인어를 배울 수 없는 곳. ‍

17. 학교에서 지루함은 느끼는 것을 심리 장애로 진단하는 것은 마치 고래가 아쿠아리움의 작은 탱크에 떠다니다 에너지를 잃었기 때문에 고래가 정신질환자라고 진단한 것과 같다.

18. 학교 교육의 문제는 우리가 너무 적게 투자했다는 것이 아니라 너무 많이 투자한다는 것이다.

19. “학교가 교육에 방해가되지 않도록해라.”

20. 교육은 우리 스스로 교육하는 것이 최선이다. ‍

21. 진정한 교육의 토대는 우리가 누구인가에 대한 책임뿐만 아니라 우리가 누구인가에 대해서도 책임을 지는 것이다.

22. 학습과 경험을 혼합하라.

23. 갭이어, 부트캠프, 그리고 다른 형태의 프로젝트 기반 학습과 같은 학습 경험에 더 많은 돈을 쓸 수 있도록 해야 한다.

24. 등록금이 매년 상승해야 한다는 경제학의 철칙은 없다. 여러 가지로 볼 때, 대학들은 1980년대 초반과 마찬가지로 학생들을 가르치는 데 있어 동일하거나 더 열악하다. 하지만 지금, 학생들은 그때의 네 배나 많은 돈을 지불하고 있다.

25. 일률적인 모델을 탐색하기로 선택한 선구자는 멍청이처럼 문신을 새기기보다는 용기에 박수갈채를 받아야 한다.

‍38. 대학 도서관에 있는 이름들은 대학을 나오지 않았다. - 플라톤, 셰익스피어, 키츠, 오스틴, 셸리, 디킨스, 휘트먼, 디킨슨 - 대학은 없다.

‍ Bach, Mozart, Beethoven. Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, Charlie Parker, Miles Davis. The Beatles — no college. ‍ Da Vinci, Michelangelo, Rembrandt, Vermeer — no college. ‍ Jay Z, Kanye, Drake. ‍ The Wright brothers — with a home library, no college degrees, and a bike shop — kicked off the age of flight. Their main competitor, Samuel P. Langley, a professor of mathematics with grants from the U.S. government and the Smithsonian, crashed into the Potomac. ‍ A third of billionaires don’t have college degrees. ‍ The current system of higher education perpetuates inequalities in wealth and power. End discrimination in hiring or admissions to any program based on having already received a credential. No discrimination in jobs based on prior schooling. ‍ A government of the people, by the people, for the people, but only if they have a BA should perish from the Earth. The Federal government — with its GS payscale that rewards useless credentials — organizes a vast network of discrimination and raises costs by preventing otherwise talented people from working in the public sector. If smart criminals can elude the FBI without college degrees, then the FBI shouldn’t require them either. Abraham Lincoln ended slavery without a college degree. Good governance requires no credential. ‍ “The discipline of colleges and universities is in general contrived, not for the benefit of the students, but for the interest, or more properly speaking, for the ease of the masters.” Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations ‍ The university rewards researchers over teachers. ‍ The people who give exams or evaluate essays and the people who teach should not be one and the same. Creating the best content for people to learn and creating a system to certify that people have achieved some level of mastery are two different problems. By fusing them into one, universities curtail freedom of thought and spark grade inflation. Critical thinking is currently mistaken for finding out what the professor wants to hear and saying it. ‍ Let some portion of tuition be spent on Patreon or similar platforms. We would see more diversity of thought and experimentation in teaching methods, if we let university students divert some portion of their fees to professors whose courses they find valuable, even if these professors are not employed directly by the university. The Universidad Francisco Marroquín in Guatemala took an innovative step by having two business schools on campus compete with each other. ‍ Teacher’s pay should neither be uniform, nor based on credentials earned, nor on number of years worked. Awful teachers are overpaid and cannot be fired. Great teachers are underpaid. Abolish any system of compensation that attracts the mediocre and uninspiring and repels the imaginative and daring. ‍ Licensing is a tool to obtain and enforce monopoly. Treat it no differently from Standard Oil or Microsoft. Trade unions — including doctors, lawyers and NYC hotdog carts — maintain higher incomes by limiting the number of people who can perform the work. Medical schools, law schools, and other professional schools should drop a college degree as a requirement. Professional organizations that determine license requirements should drop the college degree as requisite. We must fight the use of admissions to limit the number of doctors, lawyers, nurses, and so on. ‍ While we’re at it, overthrow the medieval guild system of lawyers, professors, doctors, architects, landscape architects, pharmacists, acupuncturists, embalmers, naturopaths, yoga instructors, hair stylists, cosmetologists, real estate agents, insurance agents, private investigators and anyone else who inflates the price of their services by outlawing competition with bureaucratic charters. Many licensing boards use irrelevant considerations — matters that have no relation to skill or competence — in determining who can work a job. Certification combined with systems of credit and reputation can protect consumers more effectively. ‍ Teach the courage of having your convictions attacked, to attain what is highest and most difficult, to serve individuals, not systems, to save civilization from utter destruction. ‍ The liberal arts and what colleges call the liberal arts are as different as civilization and insolent barbarism. ‍ What good is all the philosophy in the world if it keeps you from becoming a philosopher? ‍ The professors of subfields within subfields should be recognized as the pin factory workers they are. The academic division of labor, particularly in the humanities, is narrow and screwed, the infinite multiplication of finite banalities. ‍ Professors should be better than snowmen. Snowstorms cancelling class tend to bring more joy to students than learning new ideas. What a strange service! Higher education, root canals, rectal exams, and schooling are the only services that consumers rejoice in having cancelled. ‍ The philosopher Jason Brennan: “I frequently read articles and books that defend universities by saying something like, ‘Universities are not mean to accomplish X, but instead Y’ where X is something corporations, politicians, taxpayers, and lay people care about, and Y is some noble high-minded goal, such as preparing people for democracy or creating enlightened minds. But then the people never supply any evidence that universities actually achieve Y, and, oops, over here we have lots of evidence that they don’t.” ‍ “Do you want to be cogs on a wheel driven by a pinion which revolves in obedience to a force outside itself?” — Charles W. Eliot, president of Harvard 1869–1909 ‍ “The №1 problem today is not ignorant students but ignorant professors…” Camille Paglia ‍ Schooling doesn’t improve skills, but rather reveals that you have them. Employers pay degree holders because assessment is hard. We can do better. ‍ We may ridicule North Korean generals for having 613 medals on their coats, but baristas with PhDs are different only in degree, not kind. When workers have twice as many credentials for the same job they could have had in the past for none or one, it’s time to question the chain of command. ‍ Illiterate sailors on a rickety ship overthrew a thousand years of university Aristotelian scholarship in 1492. ‍ The more PhDs we mint, the fewer scientific revolutions we seem to have. There are more scientists working today than in any time in human history. It could be that science is harder or it could be they’re not all really scientists. ‍ Most published research findings are false. Yup, here’s your footnote. ‍ “I think the Ph.D. system is an abomination. It was invented as a system for educating German professors in the 19th century, and it works well under those conditions. It’s good for a very small number of people who are going to spend their lives being professors. But it has become now a kind of union card that you have to have in order to have a job, whether it’s being a professor or other things, and it’s quite inappropriate for that. It forces people to waste years and years of their lives sort of pretending to do research for which they’re not at all well-suited. In the end, they have this piece of paper which says they’re qualified, but it really doesn’t mean anything. The Ph.D. takes far too long and discourages women from becoming scientists, which I consider a great tragedy. So I have opposed it all my life without any success at all.” — Freeman Dyson ‍ Wall Street’s HR Department? The best universities in the world are turning many graduates into krill for too-big-to-fail corporate leviathans. When more than a third of a graduating class disappears each year into the gaping maw of financial services, it begs the question whether Ivy League schools are teaching critical thinking after all. ‍ Colleges obsess over inputs and remain silent on outputs. It shouldn’t be easier to graduate from Harvard than to be admitted. If the FDA requires labels on all food packages to certify ingredients and nutritional value, then universities should be required to publish all their data on how well their students learn and also the employment and career tracks of recent grads. ‍ Picking a college to attend based on its football team is like choosing to stay at a La Quinta because there is a good restaurant next door. ‍ End the NCAA’s multi-billion dollar con game: clichéd musings on the sanctity of amateur competition aside, we are witnessing — in fact, most are cheering on — the unadulterated exploitation of “student-athletes.” ‍ The highest paid employee on a college campus is not the Nobel Prize winning scientist. It is not even the president of the university, who often rakes in close to $2 million-a-year for glad-handing donors. No, the highest paid employee in the ivory tower is often the football coach. ‍ The Bro Wage Premium: joining a fraternity lowered GPA by 0.25 points but boosted future income by 36 percent. ‍ Where one went to college should not be the most interesting thing about a 22-year-old. ‍ The hypocrisy of postmodernism as a philosophy concerned with power structures is that its authority depends on the accredited university. ‍ “The eagle never lost so much time as when he submitted to learn of the crow.” — William Blake ‍ “Anyone who imagines that all fruits ripen at the same time as the strawberries knows nothing of the grapes.” Paracelsus ‍ “Hutchins once described the modern university as a series of separate schools and departments held together by a central heating system. In an area where heating is less important and the automobile more, I have sometimes thought of it as a series of individual faculty entrepreneurs held together by a common grievance over parking.” — Clark Kerr, President of the University of California system, 1958–1967 ‍ Every academic and scientific journal should be open and free to the public. It is much easier to check results for reproducibility with a billion eyes. ‍ Schools are squeezing for profits when they require freshmen at schools like MIT to take intro to computer science classes even though the students have been coding for eight years on their own. Let them test out to the edge of their competence. ‍ Modern society deprives adults of investing in the future and reflecting on the past by locking up the young and elderly in schools and nursing homes. ‍ Imagine you could study physics with Einstein or playwriting with Shakespeare. But part of the deal is you could never say who you studied with or for how long. Or, you could just have a PhD from Harvard. Which would you choose? Which would get you tenure track? ‍ The income for the best people in jobs that do not require college degrees — for example, electricians, carpenters, mechanics — is higher than the income for many jobs that list a college degree as a requirement. Some plumbers make more than doctors. ‍ We have done more to infantilize young people than to help them mature. ‍ Too much of school is about proving that you can show up every day on time, work, and get along with the people around you. ‍ Bloodletting and leeches. It is a problem that doctors existed for centuries before medicine. The same asymmetry could be said of teachers and education today. ‍ 480,000 yellow school buses out on the road every day, polluting the air, the largest transportation fleet in the country. That’s one hell of a 20th century transportation system for a 19th century school system. ‍ “Academic politics is the most vicious and bitter form of politics, because the stakes are so low.” — William S. Sayre ‍ If the signaling value of a college degree is its most valuable part, then we are creating a society that values the appearance of success more than actual success. ‍ Permanent grades on a permanent transcript inculcates a permanent fear of failure. ‍ The future is present but invisible. We have to pull it from a place unseen, where no one is looking, through the door no one has tried with the key we have long forgotten. Our future was lost in our past. We can find it. ‍ “Remember where you won. Remember where you lost. Wonder why.” Glyn Maxwell ‍ We are in a crisis. Less school, more freedom. ‍ The future of education will be (i) asynchronous & synchronous, here & there, (ii) decentralized, the best content from wherever, (iii) customized — Aristotle for an army of Alexanders, (iv) with attention to measuring improvements at the edge of competence (v) accessible to all for cheap, and (vi) global. ‍ We will be judged by generations to come by what we build, not what we consume. Will it survive time better than its maker? ‍ Education ought to be a mission not merely to instruct the world but to liberate it.