Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates challenged the governors of America’s 50 states to make college preparation a priority for everyone in public high schools. Anything less would condemn millions to lives denied opportunity.
It’s an equation we’ve all heard many times: college graduates make more money, therefore they are happier, therefore send more people to college to find better lives for themselves.
The day after Mr. Gates delivered this heartfelt appeal, I left for China where my hosts were eager to discuss the Gates address. The linkage between money and college, after a century of steady propaganda, had crossed the ocean to China.
Not a single press account I read or heard bothered to point out that Mr. Gates himself dropped out of college after a single year. Or the even more provocative detail that he hasn’t bothered to go back. Hmmm.
Without dropouts like Bill Gates, America wouldn’t have a dominant global position in computers at all. We owe a great deal to dropouts, as well as record government subsidies during the computer’s development period. College had very little to do with it.
Paul Allen, co-founder of Microsoft, was a dropout too. He never bothered to go back for a degree either.
Steve Jobs, the big man behind Apple, dropped out of Reed College after one semester. In all the years since, a pressing need for a diploma hasn’t surfaced yet. Steve Wozniak, cofounder of Apple, abandoned college and never looked back.
And whatever Michael Dell of Dell Computer owes his dazzling success and his billions to, it isn’t college. He too dropped out. Larry Ellison, CEO of Oracle, you guessed it!
Some measure of the gross disinformation peddled on high can be guessed at if you realize that nobody in the computer business believes that high school or college training has much to do with success in the design or operation of the things.
Attention to schools is the best advertising the computer business can get, because schools are the biggest customers. But you can acquire enough facility with the things in 60 days outside school to handle anything MIT is likely to throw at you.
My daughter Briseis told me that. She graduated from MIT, a computer wonderland, and to my dying day I’ll never forget her outrage about the considerable number of MIT students who drop out long before graduation for lucrative jobs at corporations that couldn’t care less that they have no degree.
When I got to my hotel in Guangzhou, encomiums for Mr. Gates were still echoing in the international press. The presence of the media in China is puzzling until you realize that half the people in China seem to speak English. After a few days I came to see that nearly universal Internet access in a dazzling array of businesses was the reason for this startling language facility.
It had nothing to do with colleges, which didn’t surprise me.
Fast Food China
Computers weren’t the only American dropout businesses cutting a huge swath across China. Block after block revealed a density of fast-food franchises, and each Taco Bell, each KFC, each Golden Arches, was jammed wall-to-wall with Chinese.
Here in a city with the most exquisite and affordable Chinese food on Earth, killer French fries were winning the day. Good for America and good for Chinese medicine.
Back in the United Sates, burger-flipping is also a business exclusively created by high-school dropouts. According to the best-selling Fast Food Nation, every single founder of every major fast-food chain is a dropout. All of them.
More school isn’t the answer, Mr. Gates. Too much school is our problem.
The Other Dream Team
China is so perfectly encased in a bubble of American entertainment I’ll be dumbfounded if much Chinese culture exists in 30 years. Right under their noses, we’re colonizing their minds.
I was having tea at an outdoor café where about 50 Chinese men and women of all ages sat entranced before a TV set showing the Minnesota Timberwolves pro basketball team have a go at the Detroit Pistons. Then the thought struck me: It won’t be long before these people are hooked on everything American. Soon they’ll want to participate in the American imagination.
Not America’s bad schooling, but its imagination.
It turns my stomach to say this, but we owe more than we know to our dream team: David Geffen of DreamWorks (flunked out of Brooklyn College), Yoko Ono (dropped out of Sarah Lawrence), Blockbuster founder Wayne Hurzenga (logged only three semesters), Ted Turner (kicked out), Bill Murray (dropout), Sharon Stone (dropout), Brad Pitt (dropout) – hey I could go on until Christmas.
The Gates approach could bankrupt our native genius by locking away even more of our young people – at the zenith of their creative power – into sterile classrooms.
Why would he do this? If he thinks the jobs will be there to absorb these millions of new college graduates productively, then he doesn’t understand the lessons of British India or post-World War I Germany about what happens when too many people trained as clerks for the bureaucracy — for that’s really what our colleges are about — suddenly find themselves underemployed.
Our economy has prevailed against all comers for so long because it has allowed resourcefulness, inventiveness, and imagination, along with courage, to dominate.
Try to understand what it really means to embrace the American dream of liberty, how very rich that made us, and will again if we are willing to turn our backs on the promise of corporations to make us safe.
We need to demand that our schools locate our own American genius once again and learn to know and appreciate it. We’ve had about a half-century now with schooling in the service of government and corporation, instead of serving families or free enterprise.
Fifteen years ago, Supreme Court Associate Justice Sandra Day O’Connor told graduating college seniors, “Your challenge will not come so much in breaking new paths but in deciding to choose among many paths open to you.”
But 200 years earlier, Thomas Jefferson said that only bad citizens train themselves to fit the reality they inherit, but good citizens make the society they live in.
Citizens argue with power. They aren’t yes men. They don’t memorize what society says they should be taught in colleges. They make the world they live in.
The Jeffersonian ideal of citizenship isn’t Justice O’Connors, and only one is fit for free men and women.
The Secret of Jazz
The Apostle Paul wrote again and again that salvation isn’t about following the rules. We aren’t going to find secular salvation today through observing the rules of yesterday. Alas, they are mainly what colleges teach. The best clue to what path to follow is hidden in our jazz.
Apple Computer is jazz, McDonald’s is jazz, Dream Works is jazz, comic books are jazz, block parties are jazz, bass fishing derbies are jazz, the Williams sisters are jazz, Tiger Woods is jazz.
Over in China, the revered Shanghai Conservatory of Music, the oldest continuous music school on the planet, can’t believe the principals of jazz are real! That with enough courage and trust in yourself, you can hear a piece of music once, and ring dazzling changes on it for ever and ever.
They can’t duplicate our jazz.
But everything else we make doesn’t worry them a bit.
The road to wealth comes from understanding yourself, and doing what you do best, not what other people do best.
America faces an emergency. Vested interests — including the interests of colleges — have to be set aside for the common good. The biggest obstacle blocking American progress is forced institutional schooling; the next biggest is forced college training that promised far more than it can deliver.
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