A Different Approach to Higher Education

This article in today’s New York Times highlights colleges that take a different approach to preparing young people for the real world.

Mixing practical and academic skills, students build confidence and competencies they would not experience at a traditional school. At Deep Springs, the school highlighted in the first part of the article, most students transfer to traditional university after two years working as cowboys, butchers, firefighters and cooks.

From the article:

Students may even find a kind of relief in the unglamorous work that is so different from the influence-farming and image management that is characteristic of our age. Manual labor, the philosopher Matthew Crawford has written, seems to relieve man “of the felt need to offer chattering interpretations of himself to vindicate his worth. He can simply point: the building stands, the car now runs, the lights are on. Boasting is what a boy does, who has no real effect in the world.”