What is the Point of School?

You are forgiven if you have come to believe that school is only about obeying a bunch of rules, following directions, getting good grades, and graduating. It would be easy to come to that conclusion.

Traditional schools provide you a predetermined path to graduation. They have rules and requirements for how you should behave, when your day starts and stops, and what you can wear.

They have already figured out what you should learn and how you should learn it. Traditional schools are organized for you to learn along side students your own age and taught by professional teachers inside buildings that are more or less isolated from the surrounding community. Most importantly, they have decided why it is important for you to be in school and learn the things they put in front of you, even if they don’t exactly share that reason with you.

It doesn’t have to be that way.

There are other ways to approach learning.

You are a teenager. You are at a very unique and special point in your life. A period of exploring and figuring out the world and your place in it.

Shouldn't school be about that? Exploring. Figuring it out. Finding your place.

This field guide is designed to help you do just that.

• Explore the world
• Find your place in it

The field guide is all about helping you to live a good life but living a good life doesn’t mean following a path that is already selected for you. After all, if you follow someone else’s path, you will only end up at their goal not yours.

The job of school could be to help you live a good life. If schools made that the point, they would have to be organized very differently.

For one, it is up to you to decide what a good life means, not the school. They would need to give you the power to make decisions about your learning. They would need to give you the freedom to follow paths that makes sense to you. They would need to be ok with the idea that you can decide for yourself what brings meaning and purpose to your life.

That’s not the way schools are currently organized.

But that is what a Learning Journey is all about. It is about you exploring the world and figuring out where you fit in.

You don’t live a good life by following someone else's directions on a map. You live a good life by getting out there and seeing what the world has to offer and what you have to offer the world. That is going to look very different than traditional schools.

This is your chance to see what the world has to offer. After all, you don’t even know what you don’t know. There is a lot out there and you have a lot to learn.

And that’s ok. In fact, it is perfectly normal. There is nothing wrong with not knowing everything. It is more important that you are open to the world of possibilities than it is to prove that you memorized a bunch of random bits of knowledge.

The goal is to live a good life and to do that you will first need to know what the world has to offer.

Along the way you might find that some things will speak to you more than others.

Some things will feel more natural and more meaningful to you.

Not everyone will agree with you.

That is perfectly normal. People are interested in different things.

Different people have different interests. That isn’t all that surprising but you wouldn’t necessarily think it is true if you look at the way a traditional school is organized.

If you are going to explore the world and figure out where you fit in, you will need to acknowledge that not everyone is interested in the same things. The point isn't to adapt your interests to match everyone else, the point is to explore and find the things that have meaning for you.

The same thing is true for how good you are at something. Not everyone is good at the same things. Different people have different strengths. That is also perfectly normal and not at all surprising even if traditional school doesn’t always take that into consideration.

Again, the point isn't to demonstrate that you are good at the same things as everyone else, the point is to find your strengths and figure out ways to bring your strengths to the world.

A big part of going on a Learning Journey is to find ways to connect your interests and strengths with the world around you. To find a place and a way for you to fit in.

People of all ages are still figuring out their strengths and discovering new things about the world. The truth of the matter is that your whole life is a Learning Journey of exploring the world and finding your place in it.

Living a good life is an active process of being open to new things and connecting your strengths, skills, knowledge with the world around you.

The purpose of this field guide is to help you live a good life right now and in the future. The secret to accomplishing that is going on a Learning Journey to explore the world and find your place in it.