Free and paid subscribers get to see some of our notes. The whole conversation, including the Librarian’s essential advice for autodidacts, is available only to members of the Tortuga Society.
Last Friday we brought in special guest Librarian of Celaeno, to teach us the true meaning of education: “A progressive education teaches you how to get what you want. A classical education teaches you to want better things.”
On our younger crew-mates’ most pressing question:
Should I Go to College?
Sort of.
College is, first of all, a credential. That name on a piece of paper will still open doors. Second, capital. Colleges still have this big concentration of resources. Third, connections. A lot of what college is, is a place where businesses scout. They’ve got fifty people in the class, they’re looking for the one kid who raises his hand, who asks good questions, who’s there every day, who has something interesting to say. That’s who they’re looking for to get for the internship.
You should think of your college degree the way a person thinks of getting a black belt in a martial art. A black belt doesn’t signify mastery so much as, I am now ready to learn.
All the big tech guys are saying college is on its way out. They are correct. Elon Musk is saying college is where you go to have fun. Peter Thiel has the fellowship where he’s encouraging you not to go to college. College is on its way out, but it’s not quite there yet.
The Privateer Model
You’re getting the official credential, you’re getting the letter of marque and reprisal. Then, you’re out there in the job market, independent command, doing your own thing. You’re majoring in autodidacticism.
A problem comes when you’re an autodidact, though: you know things, but you don’t know what you don’t know. You’re not dumb, but [you] don’t know how to contextualize what you’ve read. College is the foundation of learning how to learn.
What Is an Education, and Why Is It Important?
Training is learning a practical skill, usually through repetition, but education is about cultivating yourself, rooting yourself in something beyond. It’s the development of the soul and the rational capacities. You’ll need both.
Wittgenstein was not a trained philosopher, but a trained engineer. Luke Farritor studied classics in homeschool, where he learned Greek and Latin before he majored in computer science, and was able to bring to bear that classical education to transcribe the Herculaneum scroll turned to ash by Vesuvius, and he got Elon Musk’s attention for that. The people who go furthest are not just well-trained, they are well-educated. They’re hungry for knowledge, they’re hungry to cultivate their souls. Education brings to training depth and imagination and possibilities.
We’re entering this era of the valorization of the real. With all the AI slop coming down the pike, there’s going to be a real appetite for real things. We’re either going to re-industrialize, or we’ll perish, and this new industrial revolution will require people who have technical skills - electrical engineers, mechanical engineers, software engineers - but also people with imagination.
