Education should be for everybody, not just the wealthy. If we can take money out of the education equation, we can restore hope to those that feel excluded by our current system. There are a variety of ways to do this including scholarships, veteran’s benefits, and one grossly overlooked method which is the topic of this post - self-education.

There are many great examples of self-educated Americans. I’ve been researching the topic since 2003 and have found that many indispensable people in our history have been self-educated. None of the following Americans earned college degrees (other than honorary ones, which nearly all of them received): Benjamin Franklin, George Washington, Thomas Paine, Frederick Douglass, Abraham Lincoln, Mark Twain, Thomas Edison, The Wright Brothers, Walt Disney, Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, and Michael Dell. Finding the list of people to be such a hearty stock of statesmen, scientists, authors, inventors, and innovators, I realized that learning is the thing that matters most. A degree, if one is earned, is incidental.

It’s essential to have the self-educated in our society. Would we have won the Revolutionary War without the combined efforts of Thomas Paine to sway public opinion, Washington to lead the army, and Franklin to procure needed aid from France? Probably not. Where would we be without the inventions of Thomas Edison and the Wright Brothers? Probably 1950. Without Disney’s influence on our culture and childhoods, traditional American values would likely be something different and more cynical. Without the collective efforts of Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, and Michael Dell, the entire computer industry would be unrecognizable. The point I’m making here is that self-educated individuals have always been an essential part of our culture. We should embrace, glean lessons, and teach these examples to separate the term “degree” from being a synonym with the term “education.” Not everyone has the means to attain a degree. Nearly everyone can become educated.

There is a swelling over emphasis on a college degree that threatens to extinguish this valuable part of American society. The problem is that the laser focus on degrees can be counter-productive to learning because it makes money, not effort, the primary determinant of success. Those with means strive for a bright future; those without means often give up.

Who can blame them?

The average cost of one year of college, including tuition, books, room and board in 2005, was $27,000. This is a daunting figure for a child trying to find his or her way in the world. By placing a strong emphasis on a college degree, kids from unprivileged backgrounds simply give up when they learn enough to do the math on their situations. When kids are young they tend to do well in school; but as they get older, academic achievement starts to diverge along socioeconomic lines. This divergence widens through middle school and then high school until the rift between the academic achievements of the rich and poor becomes more pronounced. With 37 million Americans (that’s 12.7 percent of the population) below the poverty line, the implications are becoming epidemic. In some high schools in Chicago and New York City, the dropout rate is over 50%. Even in the President’s home state of Texas, only two thirds of those who start high school actually finish it. An emphasis on a college education may actually be contributing to these statistics. Consider the following excerpt from Starr Parker Scripps’ article, Leaving Too Many Children Behind, published by Howard News Service:

Being uneducated in America is a ticket to oblivion. Unemployment rates today are almost four times higher among those without a high school diploma than among those with at least a bachelor’s degree. Twenty-five years ago, a college graduate earned on average twice what someone without a high school diploma earned. Today it is almost three times as much.

Notice how the comparison is made between those without a high school diploma and those with a college degree instead of comparing those without a high school diploma to those with a high school diploma. Statistics used in this way devalue any learning short of that which produces a four-year college degree, essentially lumping high school graduates and high school dropouts together - as if public education is irrelevant unless it leads to college. Scripps, who clearly cares about the education of youth, may inadvertently be doing damage by framing statistics in this manner. Perpetuating statistics like these can stifle the poor. Why? Because it strips the poor and middle class of hope. Follow the logic:

1.) Fact: The poor and middle class, by definition, do not have a lot of money.

2.) Popular assumption #1: A college degree costs a lot of money.

3.) Popular assumption #2: A college degree is essential to make a livable income and is essential for a prosperous life.

4.) Conclusion: The poor and middle class cannot go to college and therefore will not have a prosperous life.

If the assumptions are correct, then the conclusion is flawless. We should give high school dropouts a lot of credit for their intelligence. Their conclusions make a lot of sense, considering the false assumptions they are often fed by well-meaning parents, teachers, and society in general. When we perpetuate the myth of the college degree, we are in part responsible for the low academic achievement of students without economic means. Making success about money instead of learning, effort or other meritocractic factors, robs children of hope. We can hire the best teachers, and institute the best programs, but if a child is disengaged from the learning process due to a lack of hope, all other measures will be ineffective. You can’t educate someone if his learning switch is in the “off” position. Furthermore, I believe that it is this disengagement from the learning process—not the lack of a degree—that is responsible for the statistics Scripps and others love to use to illustrate how the degreeless are doomed.

Studies by psychologist C. L. Snyder and colleagues suggest that hope plays a large role in a student’s ability to engage in challenging tasks. Hope, as described by Snyder, consists of two components – the “will” and the “ways.” The “will” refers to a person’s ability to persevere, while the “ways” refers to a person’s ability to find workable solutions to a challenge. Snyder’s work regarding these two dimensions of hope, which are highly correlated, suggest that those students with hope do better than students without hope. In describing Snyder’s findings, the authors of Cognitive Psychology and Instruction state, “When confronted with obstacles, high-hope students showed greater self-determination and solution pathways than medium or low-hope individuals. . . In fact, students with higher hope and academic expectations do receive higher grades even when their academic ability is taken into consideration!”

The correlation between the will and the way, however, is unclear. We often hear it said, “Where there is a will, there is a way!” Maybe. But that is a lot to expect of a child – dogged resiliency and perseverance in the face of adversity at an early age. Instead I would suggest that the correlation for a child is this, “Where there is a way, there is a will.” This may be hard for academics to understand if they haven’t experienced it first hand. To illustrate how the emphasis on a four-year degree can translate to a lack of hope, and therefore to low academic achievement, I’d like to share with you my own story.

The anatomy of defeat - when ‘B’s mean failing
When I was a young boy my dad, an enlisted Marine at the time, sat my two brothers and me down on the couch in the middle of our small living room to have a frank discussion. He looked at us and matter-of-factly stated, ” Boys, we can’t afford to send all three of you to college, so we won’t be paying for college for any of you. If you want to go to college you’ll have to do it on your own because your mom and I just can’t afford it.” Just like that the discussion was over – short and to the point.

At the time I was a fairly average student, maybe even slightly above average. I would get mostly ‘A’s and ‘B’s, and the occasional ‘C’ every now and then. I would excel in a subject once in a while but nothing special. I realized though, that I better start doing something special because I believed the only way I could possibly pay for college was to get scholarships. So I put forth the effort, but I didn’t think my performance would be good enough to get any college to seriously consider me for full-ride scholarships. After all, scholarships would only go to those students at the top of the class. As I progressed from grade level to grade level, the mediocre grades kept showing up.

All the while, my teachers told me how important college was. “The average college graduate makes $14,000 a year more than the average high school graduate,” one told me. “Any good job is going to require a college degree. A high school diploma just doesn’t mean much any more,” another teacher explained. All of my teachers and counselors were hammering home the same message: High school is only important as a stepping-stone to college.

As I saw my hopes of going to college fade, my lackluster grades started to turn into truly awful ones. By the seventh and eighth grades, ‘D’s made regular appearances on my report card. When my freshman year in high school came around, I decided to give it one last try. I started out well, but faded fast. In my mind, I had been conditioned in a straight ‘A’s or bust mentality. If I didn’t get straight ‘A’s, I couldn’t get the academic scholarship I desperately needed to be able to go to college. When the ‘B’s and ‘C’s came in, they weren’t signs of “above average” and “average,” they were signs of my failure. They might as well have been ‘F’s. I wouldn’t be going to college; I wouldn’t be able to afford it. To my way of thinking, my quest for a higher education was over early in the ninth grade.

Once hope was gone for me, ‘A’s, ‘B’s, and ‘C’s turned into ‘F’s. My learning inertia had been effectively stopped. In some grading periods I would even get straight ‘F’s. My body was in school still, but my mind had completely abandoned the activity. Just once – in one shining moment – to prove to everyone and myself I wasn’t stupid, I surged to get straight ‘A’s for one grading period. Unfortunately, it was the only one of my high school career and it was sandwiched between two grading periods of straight ‘F’s.

Since graduating with ‘B’s and graduating with ‘D’s held the same value, at least to my flawed way of thinking, my high school goal became to graduate with the minimum effort. “Get the degree, but only work as much as I need to,” became my mantra. I would waiver back and forth between mediocre grades and ‘F’s. I would fail entire subjects. I failed Chemistry, Algebra II, Spanish I, and Spanish II (why I was put in Spanish II after failing Spanish I, I’ll never know). I even regularly received failing marks in Art, one of my passions. At the end of the day I did get my high school diploma, although I think I was a credit short and someone just didn’t check closely enough. Either that or some merciful administrator just decided to let it slide. I had already enlisted in the Marines on the delayed entry program, and there was no need to delay that over one credit. I received my high school diploma, but I certainly didn’t earn it. My life has been harder than it needed to be as a result– not because I didn’t get to attend college right after high school – but because I stopped attempting to learn essentially after the eighth grade.

This is my own example of how a child disengages from the learning process when economic realities crash into an over-emphasis on attaining a college degree. Teachers in the public education system find it nearly impossible to reach children who, similar to my childhood experience, cannot see a clear path to college. Thus, the cycle of poverty is perpetuated hand-in-hand with ignorance. There are a lot of kids poorer than I ever was, and I imagine this same scenario is played out on a massive scale every day in America. When I see statistics of epidemic dropout rates of over 50% in some schools, I don’t see a lack of potential, a lack of intelligence or even a lack of opportunity. I see a lack of hope. I see people trapped by a perception of reality rather than by reality itself. Ironically, this perception of reality is self-perpetuating. Well-meaning or not, the media and others draw flawed conclusions from statistics and imply that those without a four-year degree are doomed. The question is, “What do we do about it?”

The obvious answer is to restore hope to those who have lost it. I believe there are two possible solutions – both disassociate socioeconomic status from the prospects of success. First, we can guarantee that everyone in America who wants to go to college can go to college, free of charge. It’s probably not workable though. The cost of college is too high, and even Bill Gates and Warren Buffet don’t have enough money to make that happen universally. This is the front that the battle is usually waged on, and it is insufficient by itself.

The other solution is to use the examples of non-degreed achievers to shatter myths about the college degree – and what it means to be educated – then provide paths to become educated through existing technologies and mentorship. This is the “way” that can help the less fortunate find the “will.” Before a person from impoverished means can lift himself out of his current situation through education, his learning switch must be moved back to the “on” position.

Semper Studiosus.