This was originally several different rambles, written and edited over most of 2004.

I've been conflicted on the idea of going to college for a long time. I was raised on John Holt, on the idea that the capacity for learning is innate in every child and works best unforced. I've been unschooled since I left preschool. I was raised to believe I was the one best capable about making decisions for me. Yet, starting when I was 16, for the first time in my life everyone was very concerned that I wasn't taking standardized tests and that I didn't know algebra. Why? Well, this standardized test was the SAT. And I'd need to know algebra to apply to college.

I've seen many unschooling parents have this doublethink going on. Their child should lead their own education, blaze their own original path through learning. They should learn to read when they need to, learn to multiply when they need to, and focus on how to learn, rather than what. Then, when they hit 18, or 19, or maybe even 20, they'll be prepared for college!

Why the sudden change? College isn't compulsory. At least, you won't be sent to jail if you don't go. Or will you? Everywhere you go, you see statistics about how college graduates make more money than high school graduates. Legislation is being proposed every other month to make it possible for more and more people to go to college, get out of the slums, break the cycle of drug addiction, early pregnancy and imprisonment. There seems to be a link going the other way too – if a white middle-class teenager doesn't go to college, they throw themselves into that same cycle. Job advertisements require bachelor degrees for the most absurd things, like construction or data entry. If you don't go to college, well, shoot, you must be doomed to selling watches on street corners.

Just like if you don't go to high school. Or kindergarten. Or "Early Start" preschool programs. There's a legal kind of compulsory and there's a social kind of compulsory, and sometimes it's hard to tell the difference.

I've been going to community college on and off since I was 14. This last winter was my first quarter of full-time community college, and the question keeps bubbling up in my head: if it was better for me to structure my own learning environment when I was 10, why can't I do that now? There are many answers. I am structuring my own learning environment by choosing to go to college and learn from lectures, I can choose to take any class I want rather than having my curriculum dictated by a higher authority, I could even go to a private liberal arts college instead of a community college and do an independent study program, or design my own major. As to the last, though – how is an independent study program different from finding my own mentors, material, and resources, and not paying twenty grand a year?

My personal biggest fear is that I would simply get used to people telling me what I should learn. I worry that I would spend four years happily drifting along in a haze of research projects and theses and roundtable debates, and lose my own sense of what's worth learning and what isn't. I am lost now, having no idea what career I should work towards, but I have a sneaking little suspicion that after graduating college I would be even more lost. Both my parents enjoyed college a lot, and both of them ended up in career fields that had nothing to do with their majors. Most of their friends and peers did the same. Going to college solely to get a job is bunk. If you want a job, get a job. Qualify yourself for it and convince your hirer that you've done so. It may take a lot of time, work and money, but I'm pretty sure it won't take four years or $104,372, the average cost of a four year private college including room, board and other expenses. Even factoring in time and money it might take to figure out what job you want, college is one of the most expensive ways to go in both time and money.

By "qualify yourself for a job" I don't mean read a book on a subject and show up the next day at your idea employers office. Say you want a job as a journalist at a newspaper. Start writing freelance, maybe find someone in your hometown who knows someone who knows someone who works at the local paper (for instance, where I grew up, my dad's high school buddy is the lawyer of the woman who owns the local paper) and get a column with them, write for some magazines, get out and learn about the things you want to be writing about, study politics and sociology and all that stuff, and then show up on your ideal employer's doorstep with an impressive resume and portfolio. Basically, by "qualify yourself for a job", I mean give yourself a college degree. Not a piece of paper, but the equivalent knowledge and experience. And a gazillion recommendation letters, of course, from people who work in the field rather than teach in it. If you know what you want, do it. Don't pin your life on a piece of paper and four years of debt.

The only reason to go to college would be because you want to go, because you learn best by listening and writing, and the idea of reading textbooks all weekend sends you into a dizzy daydream.

Again, I have to ask myself, why am I planning to go to college full time starting in the fall of '05?

Well, I enjoy it. I do like lectures, especially ones where I can raise my hand and ask questions, or stay afterward to argue about some key point. I enjoy writing essays, as seen by the one you are currently reading, which was written during a semester and not written for any class assignment. I enjoy spending time in a room or building or campus with other people who are there for the express purpose of learning, and what amounts to self-directed learning in a lot of cases. There are days when my unschooler brain goes into happiness overload watching people sprawl on the couches of the college center study rooms, talking quietly about the square root of two.

Still, it scares me. It's a lot of money. It's a lot of time and commitment. It's a lot of letting other people telling me what's best for me to learn. It's confusing, you know? Perhaps along the same feeling as someone might have if their parents raised them vegetarian, and then they turned 18 and everyone's suddenly encouraging them to try the Atkins Diet. One or the other may indeed be the most healthy, or it might depend on the situation, or maybe people are going about it wrong but the idea is still good. Perhaps unschooling college would be the best idea for me, but not in this degree-driven society.

I've read several books on choosing colleges that refer to the decision of which college you go to as the first important decision of your life, maybe even the most important. For myself, I have a feeling that important decision will be "if", not "which".

I believe I may have come to terms with the idea that college can advance my learning, my true education in being a better fuller human being, my life. There are colleges which focus on the larger world and giving their students tools to navigate that world, rather than on education as an abstract concept isolated from "real life". That's what I want: mentors, pointers, people to hold my hand and suggest books, and four years where the only thing anyone is asking of me is to get better at being a good human.

I realized one night in April that I would be ashamed to go to college full time without knowing basic mathematical, scientific, and linguistic rules. I feel no shame or pain at taking so-called "remedial" algebra classes, but I'm taking them at a community college. I want to have a very solid base in clear writing, algebraic formulas, and the basics of biology, chemistry and physics, before I even attempt to enter a so-called place of higher learning. I've got a mental image of college as a real Place Of Higher Learning. Where learning is supreme dictator. Higher learning, beyond the basic laws of thermodynamics, "rules" of English grammar, and how to be a not-too-evil person. A place designed to nurture these things.

This explains why I haven't been so keen on going to college. There aren't a whole lot of modern colleges out there with that narrow a vision. Most colleges I've looked at seem to be about learning stuff, but not necessarily any specific piece of stuff, or for any particular reason. There are places like Reed College in Portland, OR and St. Johns College in New Mexico which are definitely exceptions. Both places have a core curriculum, an implicit statement that they are presenting the best way to learn about the world, and an explicit expectation that their students work their butts off. However, both of them are very, very focused on learning and their core classes. I don't want to go to an ivory tower. I've spent my whole life placing my education in the context of the world around me, not separating it. So... I want a college with a narrow focus on Higher Learning, but not as narrow as Higher Learning And Nothing But. Hence my lack of interest in college for the past two or three years.

I don't have any such problem with community college. I don't expect community college to be anything but a gathering of classrooms, resources, and people with degrees and teaching credentials. So I'm having a lot of fun using college as a means to my ends, rather than falling over in mighty worship and letting it use my brain as a means to its ends of learning... something important, but unspecified.

But I'm feeling a bit lost. There's a lot to learn out there, a lot of classes, a lot of teachers, a lot of experiences to have. Logically, it makes sense that since college presidents and deans and faculty spend their careers figuring out what best helps students figure out the world around them, they'd know more about it than I would. Many don't, of course. But here's my specific focus: I want to save the world. I want to benefit the world. I want to be an asset to the world. And I have no clue how to do that. The horns of my dilemma are named Minimum Wage and General Studies.

Hopefully I'll be able to accept my cool college of choice for what it is: sometimes a real Place of Higher Learning, and sometimes a bunch of humans trying to figure out what the hell's going on.