David McElroy

The woman seemed confused from the beginning. She was attending a one-day teacher workshop on middle school math education that was being conducted by a prestigious national organization. But she seemed completely lost when it came to actual math.

At one point, an exercise required simplifying a fraction. Hers was 16 over 20. She had no idea that it simplified to four-fifths. She was then supposed to convert that into a percentage. She not only didn’t know off the top of her head that it was 80 percent — which most people could do — she also didn’t understand when someone punched four divided by five into a calculator and showed her the results.

It’s pretty bad for a math teacher to be this ignorant of the very simple math she’s supposed to be teaching, but it’s actually worse. The woman was at this workshop because she’s writing a specialized math curriculum for her entire state. She works for her state’s department of education — and this woman who didn’t understand the basic material is about to write what all the kids are supposed to learn from.

Are you scared yet?

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Why do I pay for 1,450 square feet of space to live in? I think about that frequently, and I don’t have a good answer. I live alone, with just the cats and a dog to keep me company. (They mostly hang out close to wherever I am.) I basically need a desk for my computer, a place to sleep and a bathroom. So why do I waste the money on space that could house four or five families in some parts of the world?

I’ve been thinking about this more and more lately. That makes it sound as though it’s just a rational thought, but it’s more than that. I’ve been feeling something I can only call a compulsion in my heart to get rid of almost everything I own and move to a much smaller place.

Do we really own the things we own? Or do they own us? I don’t have a tremendous amount of stuff — certainly not compared to most people I know — but the stuff I do have is making me feel weighed down. I don’t know why. I just know I don’t like it.

We live in a society with certain expectations of what’s acceptable, especially for those of us in the middle class or higher. We’re supposed to have a home that looks a certain way. We’re supposed to fill it with socially acceptable furniture. We’re supposed to care what other people think about what we have. We’re supposed to want the things that other people have. And most people believe they do want those things.

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What if the whole system of college education in this country is mostly a scam? What if it’s a system that sucks untold billions of dollars out of our pockets, but provides very little in tangible value?

I felt that college was an absolute waste of time and money for me. There were a very few classes in which I learned things that felt worth the time and effort. (Thank you, Dr. Pound.) For the most part, I was jumping through hoops that didn’t matter. I learned almost everything that mattered (and absolutely everything I ever learned related to journalism) by doing the work, not by sitting in a class.

For a long time, I wondered if it was just me. Everybody else seemed to assume that a college degree was great and gave them a golden ticket for life. In the years since then, though, it seems as though more and more people are questioning this system.

Zachary Caceres has a new article at the Radical Social Entrepreneurs website that should make you question the value of traditional colleges — even elite colleges. It’s about how a Google engineer and ex-Stanford University professor is shaking up the world of higher education. (Read the article. It’s worth it.)

Last year, Sebastian Thrun was teaching a graduate-level class at Stanford about artificial intelligence. (Thrun is the man behind Google’s self-driving car, so he knows a thing or two about the subject.) He became frustrated that he was only reaching 200 students in one location, so he did something unprecedented. He sent out one announcement that he was offering the same lectures, quizzes and tests to anyone, for free. His simple offer found 160,000 takers.

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