“Many successful college kids would have been successful whether they went to college or not.”

“The bachelor’s degree? It’s America’s most overrated product.”

“More people need to realize that you don’t have to get a four-year degree to be successful.”

At some point, before or after you read this entry, I highly recommend reading this short article from which I have pulled the above quotes, Living the Good Life Without College.

This John Stossel article stirs up copious controversy among its readers: there is a frighteningly obsessive value put on “education” in this day and age; particularly on K-12 and University being the only means of achieving a “proper” education. Words I hear repeatedly in these arguments are “job,” “employment,” and “success,” often coupled with “you can’t.”

A huge amount of fear is ingrained in the American mind. We are told by teachers, politicians, peers, and often our family that, to paraphrase John Taylor Gatto, we must go to school, work hard, and get good grades; go to college, work hard, and get good grades; graduate, get a job, work hard for 40 years in that job to get as many promotions as possible and make as much money as possible, in order to buy as much STUFF as possible. So, in essence, the purpose of education is to own large amounts of grand material possessions. How valiant. How patriotic.

“Success” is a lightly thrown-around word these days.  What is this ever-sought enigma of ultimate achievement? What does that word really mean?

It is time we stepped out and thought for ourselves enough to acknowledge we want something different.  Something better. It’s an injustice to deny ourselves the true success of passion pursued.

It really is strange: in spite of everything else you could do in your precious young years, you are told to jump right into college after graduating highschool, whether you know what you want to do or not.  And, because you are unsure of what to do, you run the risk of college becoming another comfort zone, as grade school probably was – a safe cocoon delaying your rightful introduction to the Real World of Real Awesome Things.  So many of us jump into college not knowing why, or what we want to do afterwards.

Is it worth wasting years of our lives slogging away at something we are hardly passionate about, just because we are supposed to??

Somehow, it is tempting. By November 2007 (my “senior” year) I had gone around in millions of circles in the past eight months or so, pondering over what I truly wanted to do for the rest of my life. Every time I’d settle on something I would say to myself, “Okay, this is the one this time! This is my calling.” Of course, I usually changed my belief about what my “calling” was every month, give or take a couple of weeks. Naturally, it would have been be nice for me to simply choose one thing to study for four years, and sit back and “relax” while I learned it all, feeling secure in the knowledge that, once I graduated, I would have a degree that would supposedly allow me to make tons of money in the corporate world. But, by the time I would have graduated, would I have even wanted to have a job even close to what I had majored in?

I am 21 now: the answer is a firm NO.  And that’s for a myriad of reasons that I couldn’t have even comprehended at 17.

What have I been doing these past four years?

I’ve lived with passion, reverence, and awe: embraced this life and what it gives me, discovering myself and what I love doing – discovering the world and what it holds for me, and what I can give back.

When we are passionately pursuing life, we are successful.  We can do this with or without college: it is up to you whether you go now, later, or never.

“Success: To laugh often and much, to win the respect of intelligent people and the affection of children, to earn the appreciation of honest critics and endure the betrayal of false friends, to appreciate beauty, to find the best in others, to leave the world a bit better, whether by a healthy child, a garden patch, or a redeemed social condition; to know even one life has breathed easier because you have lived. This is to have succeeded!” ~Ralph Waldo Emerson