My one beef with Education

I’ve just graduated from college, meaning that I’ve finally finished going through a process that lasted 20 years*. I don’t feel that educated: in fact, there’s so much that I don’t know, even more that I have forgotten (calculus, for example). 

When my college’s intro physics class brought us down to this uber powerful magnet and let us feel the magnetic field, I felt something was wrong. Why did this seem familiar? Oh wait — I had done the exact same thing in 8th grade at a science camp at Williams College. I was being taught the exact same thing in the exact same way over a gap of 6 years. 

Here’s the problem: the education system is stateless. It does not store any understanding and knowledge, or lack thereof, that a student might have. You might argue that of course it has state; every student is in a grade, which typically is incremented yearly, staring at 0 at Kindergarten and rising to 12. But I would like to argue that grades are more of a measure of how long a student instance has been in the system than what they actually know and are capable of. Grades are circumstancial. No matter how many tests I took or homework assignments I did, my education never became tailored to solve holes or gaps in my understanding. Similarly, I was forced to learn the same thing many times over.

This became even more apparent when I switched from the American Education system to French at age 8. Now, not only was my own instance not taken into account, but I was grouped into a superclass that didn’t fit: I was assumed to have spent 2 years learning to write in ink with a fountain pen and undergone 3 years of Geography lessons, while the fact that I knew how to use a computer or speak English fluently scared and surprised teachers.  

Most student’s biggest beef with education is testing, and in fact many of America’s progressive schools like to boast that they don’t test or give out marks. There’s nothing wrong with testing. I’m currently reading Reality is Broken, in which Jane McGonigal argues that the essence of games is overcoming unnecessary obstacles. Tests are the ultimate unnecessary obstacle. 3 billion hours a week are spent gaming, i.e. overcoming tests we set up for ourselves. What makes tests at school any different? They have 0 impact. They are not immediate. I could have mastered electromagnetism in 8th grade and then 6 years later been tested on the exact same material. Why not use testing as a way to have an education status bar updated in real time? A status bar that is different for every individual student instance? Would that be so hard?

*(I started preschool at age 2. How precocious of me)

I live in a tent at a place called Magic

Magic was founded in 1979. From the outside, it looks like 3 small adjacent houses in the suburbs of Palo Alto, each on their own plot of land. But when you walk inside, you realize that they are integrated with a dozen outside structures and thick vegetation, forming a labyrinth:

 It’s amazing that by a few small sacrifices — owning very few personal belongings & having small (freshman dorm room sized) personal spaces, human beings can live much more closely together. If they’re willing to put a small amount of work into the community, they can live efficiently, healthily, and with minimal waste. 15 feet from my tent there’s a one room building called the Taj, where Luis the uber-flexible yoga instructor lives. He wants to practice yoga more often, and I want to practice yoga more often, so we simply meet right inside the common living room spaces for 6:30 am yoga several days a week. Although I barely knew any of Magicians before coming out here, it’s impossible to be lonely…first of all, there isn’t time, second, there’s no place to be alone, and there are so many books here you can just find and pick up and lose yourself in one.

Who is the leader? Well, David Schrom unofficially formed Magic in ‘72 and has been here on the west coast since before then. I finally found out last night where he went to school — Yale. When he was an undergrad there, you had to wear a coat & tie to the dining halls. So he wore only a coat & tie. Naked otherwise. The rule fell. Only one of many rules David has been questioning over his lifetime. 

You can pee anywhere outside (as long as its not on buildings). 7-year old Harper actually has a pile of sand right outside his door tailored for this purpose . He calls it his pee-sand. I discovered this the other day when I was talking to him and he started laughing hilariously and pointed at me and said: “You’re standing in my pee-sand!”. 

David likes to put people out of their comfort zone a little bit in order to make them more aware of the basic animal sides of their bodies. He’ll fart loudly in the middle of dinner discussion, use the bathroom while I’m showering, and pee literally anywhere where there is mulch on the ground, even facing the table during meals. 

Who lives here? There’s me and Nicholas in the tent, Federico and Jeffrey —Tesla employees, Mamu, Rocky, Dad, Hil, Jenny, and Harper — the post-nuclear family, Julia ‘02 the Microbiologist, Roy the architect, Jeff Hook - also teaches, Luis — yoga instructor/amazing athlete, Tim & Andrew, Stanford students, Viraj — student at Berkeley interning out here, Justin, Derrick, and 3 or 4 more people I’m forgetting or haven’t really met yet. Sorry to anyone if I’ve misspelled your name or something. 

So many fruits grow on the property. This morning there were over 40 plums that had just popped off the tree. These are pamellos — the fruits taste like grapefruit, and hang so low down that I continuously knock them with my head. If I knock them to the ground, I eat ‘em.

We loaded the truck with empty cardboard boxes before the farmers market. Plum branches hang low in the front lots of the houses. This truck is the only vehicle anyone at magic owns. In fact, the truck isn’t used to carry produce from the farmer’s market back to Magic — we have bike trailers for that. The truck is actually used to carry excess food to the food bank. 

This is the bounty, post-farmer’s market. We were given produce from Happy Boy farms, Kashiwase farms, and many others. Maybe one day I’ll know all the names. That’s not going to start this sunday tho, because I’m taking the day off to bike to Half Moon Bay and Princeton-by-the-sea to go surfing. 

Replace the field of flowers with Stanford and the headquarters of tech companies, and you basically have a good portrayal of Palo Alto. Notice the lack of trees on the hills— it turns out that due to invasive species, the only trees left on the hills are old ones. Magic has been leading a reforestation project for decades, and has planted over 5000 trees to date on the foothills above Stanford. I water them with a whole group of volunteers on thursdays.

No one at Magic owns cars (besides the communal pickup truck), but there are over 30 bikes on the property, and all the tools for keeping them maintained in the outside structures.

The communal dinner area. Typically we are around 15 to eat meals together at 8 pm, consisting mainly of food that would otherwise have been waste — i.e. fresh produce that people were not able to sell at the farmer’s market, dairy products past their expiration dates, etc. And bulk foods like rice, beans, and quinoa . The meals typically include intellectual discussions — the type that colleges claim to foster, but I hadn’t found until here

 This is my tent. We’ve put in wooden beds and an orange bulb lamp on an extension cord. This lifestyle is great for eating fresh produce off the land, exercising  >1.5 hours daily, living minimally, being surrounded by a helping and teaching community. All good things. Magic is awesome. 

What we need & What we want.

I am not going to purchase anything in the next 3 months. 

The only exception will be supermarket-brand food. 

I recognize that I am only able to do this for 2 reasons: 

- My unique circumstances. I am barely 5 days out of college, and have no commitments. I have been fortunate enough to have shelter, running water, and been provided for my whole life. 

- The unique circumstances of the current free digital economy. I have also just splurged on a mobile internet contract with Clear. Unlimited internet anywhere (anywhere meaning, as always, the metropolises of the continental united states). The wealth of free services I use is incredible — without purchasing anything, I will be living at a much higher standard than I could with paid services 5 years ago*.

Why: 

Buying what we want is not inherently a problem. If one can afford it, one should buy whatever they want. However, addiction to the purchasing product is detrimental. An example accross America is that the amount of plastic items (“junk”) in one’s yard is an inverse function of one’s income. 

The only addictions I think are non-detrimental are ones linked to food and water.  Positive feedback loops make us addicted to food. The magazines cry: Carbs are more addicting than cocaine. Frankly, that’s a great thing - of all things to be addicted to, we should be addicted to the core source of energy that fuels our existence. We should desire food, because food has the function of fueling our existence.

In my case, my healthy addiction to food became linked at a young age with product. This is the first branded product I ever wanted: 

Kindergarten was the first year that my peers and I actually began owning things, and no matter who you were the thing that everyone had was snacks for snack time. Of course, I didn’t have the branded snack. My parents are green/hippies/socially-concious so my food was generic organic.This was the first time I strongly desired something for more than its actual function. I wanted the Nabisco Handi-Snacks because they were Nabisco Handi-Snacks, not because they were carbs & fat. And I wasn’t the only one. Non-branded food had essentially 0 value when trading. I could trade an entire apple to get one Ritz Bitz cracker. I would regularly trade an entire apple for one Ritz Bitz cracker. Form had won over function.

Pogs - A cultural phenomenon of the late 90s

This Kindergarten market economy was more than just a barter economy: we had Pogs as our currency. Pogs were essentially the Kindergartner’s Bitcoin (I just discovered what Bitcoin is, and sounds to me like today’s Pogs: http://www.weusecoins.com/). I don’t think i ever found out where to buy Pogs — they could only be accrued from trading. We never even played the game associated with the culture — like most lowest echelons in societies, because they were valuable to someone (in our case, the older kids), they were valuable to us. As Kindergartners, the game was probably too complicated for us anyway. Currencies see their value fluctuate over a period of time and finally became obsolete. Pogs followed that same trajectory, but at a massively accelerated pace. By second grade, my shoebox of Pogs was useless. I feel the same way when I discover old French Francs. Looking back at dead currencies makes you wonder “why could I ever want that?”. Currencies are almost purely form (except for US pennies, which apparently cost more to produce than the $0.01 they are worth).

Goal:

This is just an experiment. Form and function have become married in today’s world  - in the case of Kleenex or Xerox the product’s name has become synonymous with its function. What we need and what we want have become intertwined. As humans, we have biological needs, and therefore need things that match those functional programs. But do we really need the form? I am going to start it all at Zero to see what I really need. I’m assuming all I need is food, shelter, water, and the hygienic material your average college kid has. And electricity*. 

What I actually want to spend currency on:

Changing the world. Maybe that will take the form of funding awesome projects on Kickstarter.com, maybe if I have the necessary wealth it will be investing in promising avenues in clean tech/ biotech . And it definitely will include splurging on branded products again. But I hope that after this experiment, I will be able to do so not like a crack addict hunting down his next score, but responsibly and deliberately, like a cyclist enjoying the luxury of the view after a long ride. 

Really, Why I am doing this?

As a startup founder, I would definitely benefit by being able to have this type of maniacal control on how you spend.

Also, I’ve been influenced by many individuals about this project. My friend Sean Frazier has been doing a similar “experiment” for the last few months, working at a sustainable farm that is powered only by human and animal work, leaving the lightest footprint on this planet. Likewise, I’ve been influenced by the sustainable living practices at Magic in Palo Alto, CA: http://www.ecomagic.org/

And if you don’t think your lifestyle matters: http://www.myfootprint.org/ . Take the test. It’s sobering. Very, very sobering.

*Free Services I use via web:

     Evernote — note taking + word processing

     Netflix — films

     hulu + youtube + vimeo : video content other than films

     Music: Pandora, Hypem, Turntable.fm : music . If you are not familiar with turntable.fm, visit. Its like having a miniature version of Pacha/Reina/Showcase/[ insert club name ] bundled right into your browser, minus the stains and smells. And unfortunately, minus the actual human beings. Fortunately, their avatars are cuter than your average human.

     Huff Po, Hacker News, Techcrunch — newspapers

     Google Books — Books. Google has every book that is in the public domain. That’s the entire works of every author older than Fitzgerald. I don’t know about you,  but that’s enough reading material for me. 

     Social: facebook, gchat

     Mail/messaging: gmail

     Calendar: Google Calendar

     Education: All my Princeton CS courses put their material online on sites like this http://www.cs.princeton.edu/courses/archive/spr11/cos333/topics.html. Other universities do the same, and I epsecially enjoy lectures from MIT/Standford on iTunes U  @  . Also see TED, and all the tech blogs in the world

     Actually, that’s pretty much all I use regularly. I thought there were more!

Note:  I used to watch Tron as a kid, and the current state of the high tech economy is like the world of Tron spilling out into the real world. It’s so cool to see things straight from Sci-Fi that you imagined as a kid suddenly emerging. Asimov totally described a spoken word note-taking iPhone app in the first Foundation novel.

Thanks to Sean Frazier and Siofra Robinson for reading drafts of this.