I can remember years ago having a discussion with someone about the purpose of college. I was arguing that university often doesn’t do a good job of preparing young people for the world of work, and my friend was arguing that I was missing the point. College isn’t about economic preparedness, but about educating people for life. Higher education shouldn’t be subjugated to the needs of the capitalist machinery.
I think this is mostly a fantasy. Like it or not, most people go to school for to improve their economic and social standings. High-minded ideals on the virtues of a broad liberal arts education are mostly lip service.
However, this debate got me thinking. Assuming you were to fulfill that high-minded goal of education, how would you do it?
I find it doubtful that the traditional university curriculum would be the best way to do that. Probably the best way wouldn’t involve an institution at all, but be something you undertook on your own.
What Would Be in Your Ideal Ten-Year Self-Education Quest?
So in this I’d like to engage in a speculative fantasy. If you had ten years, with the ability to support yourself on a modest stipend, how would you give yourself the best self-education in the world?
Admittedly, few people could put in ten years full-time, without working to support themselves. In that sense, this is a purely hypothetical exercise. However, I often find it useful to start with an ideal scenario first, and then make compromises to fit reality, than to start by immediately dismissing things out of practical concerns. Even if a ten year full-time self-education journey weren’t possible for most, perhaps it could be stretched through part-time study or sabbaticals over one’s entire lifetime.
Additionally, I’m going to focus on education purely for the sake of learning. The economic merits of skills and knowledge play no role in their importance. This doesn’t mean you can’t learn economically valuable skills, just that there’s no primacy given to learning accounting over art or finance over philosophy just because the former are more economically valuable.
Specialization, is similarly discountable. I want a broad-based education, deep enough to appreciate the richness of a subject, but not to devote every moment to a single skill just to become competitive in it.
Again, this isn’t to say that those motives aren’t important—they certainly are. But rather that it might be fun to imagine what you would learn if they weren’t important.
Think of this as the educational equivalent to the what-would-you-do-with-a-million-dollars speculation we often engage in to think about what are interests would be if we didn’t have to worry about money.
My Ten-Year Education Plan
Given this freedom to speculate, here’s what my ten year allocation of time would be, with explanations:
Side note: Since it’s causing the most confusion, don’t think of the below list as implying that the study of each of these subjects needs to be done sequentially. Many of them could be studied at the same time. Instead, it’s best to read this list as the relative allocation of time, not it’s exact scheduling.
1. Three years lived abroad, in different languages and cultures.
The first thing I’d add is the very thing I find conspicuously absent in most liberal arts educations: living in a different culture. Travel, moreso than reading books, is truly a mind-expander. Especially if that travel is done with the intention of immersing in a culture and not spectating it as a tourist.
In my three-year journey, I’d spend two full years in a stable location to maximize language acquisition and deep experiences. Preferrably one year in Europe and one year in Asia. South America or Africa would also be reasonable substitutes, based on your own level of interest. This could hypothetically be one year in Germany and one year in India, or one year in Spain and one year in Japan.
The third year of living abroad would be shorter stays over more regions. The goal here would be to get the breadth of seeing a lot more places to miss the inevitable gaps that occur from a more concentrated exposure to a specific country.
I wouldn’t do these three years in a row, but spread out over the decade. Long-term travel is one of the most exhausting aspects of self-education and one of the most dependent on enthusiasm to successfully execute. Feeling burned out by new sights is the easiest way to kill an immersive experience.
2. One year of philosophy.
I think the best approach here would be to take a number of survey courses, followed by some deep investigation into a few of the classics. Understanding Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason or Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics is probably a wasted effort if the context is not properly supplied.
Six months covering general courses in metaphysics, ethics, aesthetics, philosophy of mind, logic, etc. would be a good basis for selecting which specific works you want to study in more depth.
I would also spend at least a third of the time focusing on non-Western philosophy. This is often missing in a lot of philosophy curricula because the traditions are often not directly comparable. However, studying Hinduism, Buddhism, Daoism, Confucianism and other non-Western sources gives a greater sense of how the format of Western philosophy both assisted its development but also constrained it in subtle ways by accepting certain forms of argument but not others.
3. Six months of religion.
This could be seen as extension of philosophy, but it’s important enough that I think it deserves a separate space. One year here could be spent on all the major world religions. Even if you’re an atheist like me, I think this is hugely important because of the incredible force religion has had in shaping cultures and history.
4. Six months on world history.
Following religious studies, I’d spend six months learning world history. Admittedly this section is shallower than I put for philosophy, mostly because history is often learned indirectly through learning about other subjects (such as science, religion or philosophy). However, six months should be long enough to have a gist of the general history of most areas of the world as well as modest depth into a few key threads of history.
5. Two years on math and hard sciences.
I say two years not because these subjects are necessarily more important than philosophy or religion, but because they’re difficult enough that some minimal investment is necessary to learn anything interesting.
I’d probably focus more on math, since having a good grip of math underlies understanding almost all the other hard sciences. Perhaps a year to master calculus, geometry, statistics and discrete math. Another year spent to get a good foundation in the basics of physics, chemistry, biology and computer science.
6. One year devoted to art.
I’d spend a year split between studying the history of art and practicing creating art itself. Probably a month each spent learning the basics of sculpting, drawing and painting, then three months on a more specialized aspect of artistic development, pulled from whatever interests developed in the initial survey.
For art history, I’d spend time studying art from books, but also traveling to museums and galleries to see the art in person. This phase of the project could probably overlap with the third year of travel.
7. Six months on music.
I’d spend six months to learn a musical instrument. Learn to read musical notation and possibly the basics of composition. I think this could possibly be stretched into a year to encompass more instruments or getting deeper into composing, although that would probably involve scaling back on one of the other categories (perhaps art history).
8. Six months on meditation.
I’d allocate six months to be spent on an introspective journey. This would probably be spread throughout the ten years, although perhaps culminating in 1-3 months of dedicated time to some sort of meditative activity.
The goal here would be to more deeply understand yourself from experience, as opposed to from ideas and theory, as would be covered in the more academic sections on philosophy, religion and biology. I also believe that this pursuit would cultivate many of the characteristics you want such as temperance, discipline, patience and equanimity, which are often unrelated to knowledge.
9. Six months on economics and psychology.
I’m spending a lot less time on these subjects than I’ve devoted to others. In part because I feel that they are a lot less certain than the hard sciences, but also more theoretically constrained than philosophy. With hard sciences you can be more confident in the empirical results. With philosophy, you can be more open to the fact that they are speculative. However, I think there’s a lot of merit in learning the basic, relatively uncontested ideas in both fields.
10. Six months on practical skills.
In six months, I’d want to spend it learning the assortment of practical skills you’d want to be a self-sufficient, highly-functioning individual. Carpentry, metalwork, sewing, home repair, basic electrical work and plumbing, first-aid, simple car maintenance and others. The goal here would be to have a minimal competency in a bunch of occasionally useful simple skills, but also to create the confidence that one could easily learn more specialized aspects of these skills should the need arise.
Evaluating My Ten-Year Plan
In the space of ten years, perhaps from twenty to thirty (or perhaps as a retiree, from fifty-five to sixty-five), you could become decently versed in math, science, philosophy, religion, history, economics, psychology and art. You would know how to paint, sculpt, draw, play an instrument, fix a car, build a chair and write a computer program. You would speak at least three languages, although possibly more depending on how you allocated your travel time.
Even in the span of ten years, a lot would still be missing. There’s no anthropology. No literature or film. No architecture or athletics. However, the foundation would still be solid enough to build almost anything off of that in the future.
How Realistic Is This Plan?
This plan, as per my original conditions, is wildly optimistic. It assumes you can focus exclusively on self-education for a decade, without needing to work, support a family or be tied down to a physical location. It also assumes an unrealistic commitment to the higher ideals of self-education, with incredible commitment over a lengthy period of time.
However difficult, I’ve seen similarly lengthed self-education projects work to some extent. Benny Lewis spent around a decade [1] traveling learning languages. Many in academia have spent a similar amount of time focused on a doctoral path that didn’t necessarily translate into job prospects.
What’s different about this ten-year plan isn’t that it’s impossible, but that it’s so thoroughly unconventional, few people would embrace it as an alternative to the more conformist paths available.
Despite these difficulties, some variant of this plan is how I see my own self-education unfolding, albeit with less long-term structure and certainly not a full-time commitment. I’ve already finished much of the travel requirement, and my exposures to many of the topics haven’t reached what I could do in the time suggested above, but they might reach that in time.
What Would Your Plan Be?
I’ve spelled out my hypothetical ten-year education, now I want to know about yours. Tell me what you would do if you had ten years to devote yourself to learn only the things you feel are important to your betterment as a human being.
What would you add that is missing in my list? What would you remove to make room for it? Where do you think I’ve spent too much time? Too little?
Share your thoughts in the comments!