 I have a 21 year old son and a 19 year old son, neither of them have gone to college or seemed to be going to college. One of them dropped out of high school and that would have been a rather insane choice a generation ago or almost unthinkable. But now like you know I mean I'm totally fine with it but even my parents who you know they have PhDs I mean when I was growing up like college came after high school it was it was just not an option to step out of that. And so even they totally understand the decision of my sons and they're a little uneasy about it but they support it because the conventional educational system is just so dysfunctional it's just you can't ignore it or deny it now. The enormous amounts of debt that you have to go into to get a degree that is increasingly worthless, the bureaucratic hoops you have to trot through to the tests, the examinations, the requirements, the you know the huge classes taught by professors who are can't possibly give you any personal attention even if they wanted to. I mean the whole enterprise is on life support. So a lot of really bright young people that I run into you know it used to be that the really bright ones would go to Harvard. Now the really bright ones drop out and they look outside of the curriculum of life, the curriculum that's been offered to them for other ways to learn. So yeah some of them pieced together in education on the internet and you can get some things that way but learning is much more than the acquisition of information it requires doing which is why apprenticeship is such a powerful way to learn. Trial and error like you know getting your first video camera and trying to make films and learning the editing and making all these mistakes that is a way to learn and you can learn something that way but it's much faster to learn in a community and the community ideally would have masters and other apprentices. So how to piece that back together again from the wreckage of the institutions of mass education that we have today is again not a trivial enterprise and I think that but yeah it is a piecing together from the splinters of the system as it disintegrates which still has maybe a long way to go but even well not everybody there's still people who still really believe in it who believe that the way the best way to develop your mind and your life is to get a good education and that a good education is well represented by the institutions of higher education that we recognize in our society. Like there are still people who believe that but it is a belief that is hollowing out so many people who even who go into that system they're not going into it because they really believe that they're going to get a fine education they do go into it because they think they're going to get a good job when they come out or because they feel that there's no choice there's no alternative and in a way they're right I mean if you don't go to college and instead you go to a PDC permaculture design course like are you going to get like a well-paying job in permaculture I mean you probably won't get a well-paying job with your marketing degree from Penn State either but you're even less likely to get a professionally compensated job doing human culture on someone's organic farm so if you want to make your way in the conventional world which is shriveling but still dominant then yeah you're probably going to need to get a conventional education if that world does not interest you very much then a conventional education is going to seem unfit repellent you know how you can try to push yourself through it but you're going to be fighting yourself the whole time and there are not well-established alternatives there are some alternatives some of them have accreditation but the really radical innovative ones do not have accreditation you have to piece them together yourself and it's just something that's that's forming right now I think I kind of envision this this kind of distributed maybe four-year program where you go to this you know eco institute in that permaculture center and this non-violent direct action training thing and this meditation center etc etc etc and this you know natural building thing and like these things kind of coalesce into a four-year education in the technologies of the story of interbeing but it doesn't quite exist yet but maybe by raising the possibility it will come to us