The app for independent voices
This is one of the best things written on what's actually at stake in education right now.
The loudest responses to the crisis have come from outside the university. Alex Karp tells young people to skip college and learn a trade. Marc Andreessen argues the university is a credentialing middleman and should be disintermediated. Both are right that the university is failing. But if the answer to a broken formation system is to skip formation altogether, you have already conceded that education is justified only by utility.
I used to be closer to the "abolish the university" crowd. I spent six years in it myself, but have learned exponentially more outside of school. My husband, a dropout, found his success doing the non-conformist thing—just build. But I've come around to thinking the university is still one of the best surviving structures capable of real formation. It’s almost spiritual in what it can do at its best. Dialogue, collision across fields, structured freedom, the kind of productive friction that Bildung requires. I don't think we should give up on it.
But the reality is, people are leaving.
Education is migrating outside of the institution, into households, communities, and decentralized forums. Yet, we lack the cultural infrastructure to actually support it. Formation was always less legible than our utilitarian response to education. Now it’s increasingly private and fragmented.
