Since most of you are either too scared to drop out of school or you think I’m a crazy mofo for wanting to end mandatory education and to cut funding to ALL public education, here’s a guide on *How to Go to School* for you.  Read it if you want to get something positive out of all that mostly wasted time you spend in school.  Read it if you don’t want to come out of school as an unemployable idiot — the Artificial Intelligence Economy is waiting for you — who has to be retrained and reprogrammed by whoever hires you.

Proper Mindset

School, as is life, is a game.  Most schools are as interesting as a game of Candyland.  That’s why most students become bored with school.

With the proper mindset, you can, as Steve Jobs had, escape the boredom that will crush your curiosity and will to live.  A few principles to live by.

1. It’s YOUR job to teach and educate yourself, not the teacher’s job to teach and educate you. If you can’t learn something on your own, you won’t learn it at school.  (Repeat that until it’s burning in your head).

The reason why so many high school and college graduates are poorly educated and struggle with even arithmetic is because they thought they were done learning what was being taught when they passed the class and graduated from school.  Wrong.  You don’t become a concert pianist merely by taking a one hour lesson once a week, you become one by practicing practicing and practicing on your own for five hours a day EVERYDAY to learn the material assigned to you well enough so the teacher can critique what you learned — mostly on your own — to play.
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Another way to think of it: let’s play a game where we drop you in the middle of a 10,000 acre forest and you have to find your way out by sunset.  In scenario A, all you’re given is a compass.  In scenario B, you’re given a detailed map and a gps tracker that tells you easiest route to take and a gun just in case.  In scenario A, you don’t make it out until just before sunset.  In scenario B you make it out with 4 hours to spare.  Which scenario teaches you more and is more fun and rewarding (and scary)?  Which scenario will prepare you for the real deal, when you have nothing but your wits to make it out alive?

Point is, most teachers tell you how to solve a problem rather than teach you to solve it yourself because that’s the easy way and you complete the assignment faster — 4 hours to spare — even though you don’t learn much. That’s why so many people don’t know what to do when they encounter an unusual circumstance.  When you’ve been trained to follow procedures to solve problems instead of coming up with your own procedures to solve them, you’ll become bored with school and work and unable to solve novel problems that pop up *all the time* because shit happens *all the time.*  Innovation and understanding is possible only when you figure it out on your own, not when you follow someone’s directions.

Consider how polyglots become fluent in so many languages.  They don’t have super duper brains built for language learning or the time and money to take language classes.  They do, however, have a different approach to learning than most people, as explained in video below.

One is that polyglots don’t rely on school and teachers to teach them a new language because it psychologically handicaps them — “they expect to be spoon-fed…are waiting to be taught.” The spoon-fed method isn’t going to work because “languages can’t be taught, they can only be learned,” says polyglot Luca Lampariello.  Not relying on teachers to learn also allows polyglots to do another thing differently — they create their own textbooks and teaching methods that best suit their needs and learning styles. I mean, imagine you had to jerk off ONLY to someone else’s fantasies and porn preferences even though you have no sexual preferences in common with that person. Jerking off is not so fun when you’re forced to watch Uncle Shirley get rimmed by Hulk Hogan when what you really want to see is Miss Venezuela play with her pussy, right?  Learning *anything* is the same way, it’s YOUR vision and imagination that’ll make something fun and easy to learn. So stop with the lame excuses — “teacher sucked!” — when you get that low AP score. It’s your fault you’re mentally crippled, not anyone else’s.

2. The point of learning something is to help you solve problems, yours and those of others. (Solving problems is also the point of meaningful work. One can’t love work when it’s for a paycheck).

We have an employee headed to UW.  He was a good high school student — 1490 SATs, 5 on BC Calc exam — and wants to major in Computer Science. On paper he looks like a good candidate to be accepted into the program. I asked him what apps he’s made.  None, except for a couple of silly ones he was told to make in his high school Comp Sci class.  So I told him that his computer science peers have been making apps since they were in middle-school.  And the reason for that is they see coding as one of many tools available to solve problems, whereas this employee sees coding as a means to a financially secure and stable life.  Meaning his chances of getting into the program are low unless he changes his mindset — his approach to life — soon.

See how some become Bill Gates and Jeff Bezos, while others spend their work lives debugging monotonous lines of code? If you don’t see what you’re learning as a tool to solve problems, you’re not going to learn it.  That’s why most students forget what they learn in school.  They don’t see the point because they never ask what the point is, precisely because most schools beat beat bash beat the curiosity and independence out of them.

3. Call yourself a “stupid, lazy, cunt” every morning. And pretend to drop kick anyone who tells you you’re “smart” or good at something. That’s how those inscrutable Asians rise to the top of the class.

Here’s how those sneaky Asians do it, if you need an example.

Asians treat their kids this way because they know that complacency and self-satisfaction is right around the corner. One wrong turn and it’s over and it’s usually the inflated ego (aka self-esteem) that pulls you in the wrong direction. Proof: while first and second generation Asian Americans score higher than White counterparts, third generation Asian Americans score on par with White counterparts.  What do you think happened? Pick:

a) Third generation Asian-Ams stopped taking brain boosting Oriental herbal medicine
b) Third generation Asians-Ams eat too much pizza instead of bok choy
c) Third generation Asians-Ams assimilated and copied middle-class American parenting

Answer is “C.”

More evidence, this one from NIH study on teenage self-esteem.

Large-scale representative surveys of 8th-, 10th-, and 12th-grade students in the United States show high self-esteem scores for all groups. African-American students score highest, Whites score slightly higher than Hispanics, and Asian Americans score lowest.

African Americans have the highest self-esteem, despite performing the worst academically.  Let that sink in. Asian Americans have the lowest self-esteem, despite performing the best academically.   That’s right, those slant eyed motherfuckers have the lowest self-esteem, despite performing the best academically.  Correlation? Hey Black readers, maybe you should convince African Americans to emulate Asians instead of dancing the way White liberals tell you to dance. #Walkaway

If you’re a closet racist — like Harvard’s champagne socialist admissions committee — and still think Asians lack traits such as “courage and kindness,” (and of course, creativity) — as Harvard’s admissions committee does, it was recently revealed — and thus don’t want to emulate them, then listen to Bill Gates.

Bill Gates said:

Success is a lousy teacher.  It seduces smart people into thinking they can’t lose.

Or how about the White psychologists who found the Dunning-Kruger effect?  Definition from Wiki:

 In the field of psychology, the Dunning–Kruger effect is a cognitive bias in which people of low ability have illusory superiority and mistakenly assess their cognitive ability as greater than it is. The cognitive bias of illusory superiority comes from the inability of low-ability people to recognize their lack of ability; without the self-awareness of metacognition, low-ability people cannot objectively evaluate their actual competence or incompetence.^[1] On the other hand, people of high ability incorrectly assume that tasks that are easy for them are also easy for other people.^[2]

Or how about Socrates, the father of Western philosophy?  He said:

I know nothing except the fact of my ignorance.

Or you can follow the advice of a bunch of nitwits and live in a miserable world nobody wants to live in.

What Makes a Good School?

• Good schools teach grit and curiosity. Students at such schools are taught to struggle with and solve difficult problems on their own and with others, and to ask questions without fear of reprisal. (See Harkness Table Method used at many of the top schools).
• Good schools make competitive sports a required part of the curriculum. Sports teaches grit and how to handle emergencies, makes the body more graceful, and trains students to hone and trust their instincts.
• Good schools require participation in performance arts, especially theater arts. Theater prepares student to be comfortable in front of large audience, cultivates the memory, and teaches students to be more aware of how the intonation of their speech and the grace of their gestures affects people.
• Good schools set higher and higher expectations and expect students to achieve them.
• Good schools teach students that only they can educate themselves.

What Makes a Bad School?

• Bad schools are concerned about the emotional health of students, which ironically makes them emotionally frail and crazy.
• Bad schools tell students how to solve problems instead of letting them solve them on their own.
• Bad schools reward knowledge instead of curiosity and train students to not trust their instincts.
• Bad schools allow students to make excuses when they don’t meet standards and encourage students to lower their standards (take easier classes) to get better grades.
• Bad schools teach students that they need school to educate themselves.

There are over 35,000 secondary schools in the US. I estimate there are 200 good ones, and a total of 500 worth attending (half of them are public schools like Stuyvesant and most private schools are garbage). Chances are, you attend one of the bad schools.  That’s ok, you don’t have to go to Lakeside to become Bill Gates.  You can attend a bad school and still become Steve Jobs as he did as long as you’re mentally prepared to dodge the stupid thinking they try to get you to internalize. Or you can let yourself become mentally crippled, needy, and docile, like caged rats in a psychology experiment.  Choose.