Never Let Yourself Graduate.

The Most Dangerous Thing School Teaches You: That Learning Ends

Photo by Matt Ragland on Unsplash

🍕 I’m JA Westenberg. I write essays about technology, philosophy, productivity, and what it means to be human. If you like ideas that take their time, you’re in the right place.

While you’re here, a few things I’ve built: Kerouac, a writing app | Post Through It, a solo microblogging tool | Distributism.ai, my MCP platform | Laterware, all the AI news you need | Studio Self, a thought leadership agency for founders x VCs.

You can buy my book Permissionless here.

---

Our entire attitude toward education is flawed.

We spend years in primary school and then secondary school being coerced into absorbing information and hammered with the misconception that the point of learning is meeting arbitrary goals and being measured on our ability to memorize facts and formulas.

That’s bad enough.

What’s worse, though, is that when we finally reach the end of that tunnel, we go through a graduation ceremony and treat it like a happy funeral for our learning period.

People give speeches, and everyone reminisces about a part of their lives that is over forever.

It’s a celebration of the fact that your learning is finished.

May you never endure the hardship of cracking open a book ever again.

We then believe that after only 18 years of our lives, we have gained the information and experience we need to deal with the next 60–70 years. That’s crazy. It’s a crazy attitude, but it’s one that almost everyone slowly adopts.

When School’s Out, Learning Lets Out Too.

Most people reach the end of their school journey, go through graduation, and then stop learning. They stop seeking out new information and new lessons because they’ve already been there, done that. They literally have a certificate.

And so the entire period in which they were at school being required to learn something that would improve their lives or equip them for the real world, that becomes their only education.

Sure, they can go to university or college and extend their formal education, but they’re back in the same sprint that they ran in high school. They’re trying to get through a track as fast as they can, and jump every hurdle.

But they’ll eventually reach another graduation ceremony and gain another certificate that says they’ve ticked the boxes and learned enough.

It is complete.

The focused learning just stops. They might be forced to learn some new skills at work, or go through a mandatory course. But they won’t try to learn something just because they want to improve themselves independently.

It’s the fault of the schools, sure. But it’s also the fault of parents who turn their children’s education into a painful, constant struggle. It’s the fault of education theorists and government regulators who are tasked with deciding what information, from the entire store of human knowledge, should be crammed into a little over a decade of schooling.

It all adds up to create a negative, dragging, shitty attitude to learning anything.

You Don’t Have To Let Yourself Graduate.

Here’s what I believe. I believe that structured learning doesn’t answer the entirety of your educational need. I believe that it doesn’t answer even 50% of it. I believe that it lays the groundwork for the rest of your life as a learner.

When you view your schooling and your college education as being the foundation, not the entire block, you can start to build on it. If you spend every single year until you die ensuring that you have continued to learn, that’s going to change your level of understanding, readiness, and general insight.

I think the greatest thing a person can do after their formal period of education is complete is dedicate at least some portion of their time, every day and every week, to learning. Really learning. Reading, viewing, and analyzing the information necessary to learn a skill, a fact, a new area of expertise.

If you never let yourself graduate, you will never let yourself stagnate. You won’t fall back on old, outdated beliefs, or forget the important principles and lessons you learned before. You will keep your mind active and your edge sharp.

You have so many opportunities to learn. Right now. From videos on YouTube to entire volumes of incredible, important books that are available as a free download on Gutenberg. Not to mention the online courses that will let you learn about almost any subject. Or failing that  -  Wikipedia.

The point is, your learning really doesn’t stop because you left school. It stops because you think you’ve done enough. And if you don’t take responsibility for continuing your education throughout the rest of your life, you’re the one who will pay for it.