Dropping Out

Interesting dynamic going on now in some circles. In Silicon Valley there are many tech companies that refuse to hire anyone who went to college. They think it destroys creativity and in some ways I think they are right. It's no secret much of our education system was designed in the 1950's for turning out lots and lots of factory workers, and not so much for producing outside-the-box critical thinkers. Especially Middle and High-school - students seem to get lots of creative activities in grade school but it all ends when they hit the next phase and in come the rules.

 

Bob Lutz, previous chairman of Chrysler has famously said that people with MBA degrees actually hurt companies as they promote a sort of "paralysis of analysis" wherein every metric is graphed and tracked, including many that don't matter to the bottom line of the business.

 

Think of all the geniuses and radical thinkers that our country has produced or taken in, people like R. Buckminster Fuller, the brilliant creator of the Geodesic Dome. Or Jobs and Woz, co-founders of Apple. Or Albert Einstein. John Jacob Astor. Woody Allen. Larry Ellison. Bill Gates. Mark Zuckerberg. Ansel Adams. Paul Allen. Steve Ballmer. Indeed, just about every billionaire, inventor, and artist in the world.

 

Can you picture any of these people sitting through a lecture on Pareto charts? I can't. And in fact all these people either never went to college, were kicked out of college, or were far more creative than the rigid curriculums they tried to endure could tolerate. And I imagine there are many more who made it through and succeeded in spite of it rather than because of it.

 

Don't get me wrong, education is super-important. But it's got to be designed to provide graduates with real-world tools to function in a world filled with rapid change and no rules. It has to promote critical and creative thinking at all points. And it just doesn't. Modern education is still all about memorization and verbatim regurgitation of a set of rules, which is about as far from creative thinking as it gets.

 

And as for analysis, of course studies and data mining are critical, but only when done for the right reasons and not for the sake of creating impressive-looking reports.

 

Just my $0.02  :)