Unlike many neurotic college-dropouts who help themselves feel better by repeatedly listening to Pink Floyd, I haven’t felt like defending myself too much. I haven’t written anything much on unschooling in the last one decade. Even if I did, I know what many of you would think: “Grapes are sour!”  I do not wish to deny that there is some rationalization involved in me liking Steve Jobs who slept on the floor, returned coke bottles to buy food, and walked several miles once in a week to get one good meal at the Hare Krishna temple after dropping out of college.

My favorite businessmen were never Mittal’s and Tata’s of the world, but men like Mahesh Murthy who dropped out of college at 19, and ended up with a net worth of hundreds of millions of dollars after doing many odd jobs like being an announcer at Indian railway and selling vacuum cleaners door to door. Even though my teenage was largely wasted, my favorite fictional character is not the one-dimensional ubermensch Howard Roark, but Gail Wynand who walked into the office of a fourth-rate newspaper at sixteen, and asked “Can you spell anthropomorphology?” to the editor who inquired “Can you spell cat?” I couldn’t get through most fiction works I have read, but when I read that Howard Roark was kicked out of architecture school for insubordination, I was in seventh heaven. I went on to read it eighteen times-but wait, I am still counting.

I have always hated schooling, though in early childhood, it was a truth I would dare not admit. I was expected to say that I loved it- that the “emperor has clothes”.  When I was in school, the whole world looked like an air craft into which hordes of barbarians rushed in to press buttons at random, with self-righteous conviction that they are entitled to act on their capricious whims and fancies. Many feel that anything goes as long as they had a mushy rationalization, or an argument from authority! When I studied libertarianism, the essentials were not hard to see: What politicians and bureaucrats do to decent human beings is not much different from what adults often do to children. If we strip libertarianism down to a postcard, that is all there is to it. Once this retrospectively obvious fact is understood, the whole theory behind unschooling will fall into place. Continue reading »