your manifesto ends with a ... punchline. Really?

 I was just reading a truly fabulous website by a VC firm in Miami: Fuel.  While all VCs try to sound special and appealing to founders, this website was doing a particularly good job.  

 In fact, I was totally into it. Practically reading it aloud to myself (I really need to do something about all that coffee I'm drinking and working by myself all day).They had succeeded where most VCs fail because they had written something that doesn't make them sound exactly like all the others.

Then, right at the climax, it came to a screeching stop. Scratched record. House lights abruptly turned up high.  A bucket of cold water.  Am I seeing what I am seeing? 

The last little bit just deflated me. Here it is. See the problem!

https://www.fuelcapital.com/manifesto  Copied 2-22-22.

 See the problem? I did and I immediately googled it see if I was confused.

To faze is to disturb, bother, or embarrass, but a phase is a stage or step. It could faze your family if your princess phase lasts well into your college years. 

(Source: https://www.vocabulary.com/articles/chooseyourwords/faze-phase/)

I quickly wrote this up so they could correct it.

But, as the founder and mayor of VocabularySpellingCity (now retired), I felt that I should document this too).

 

John

 

 

Learning for Use

 Why do we go to school?  Why do we have to learn all that stuff?

I think about these questions all time and there are many stabs at answering it by many people. From the "Unexamined Life is Not Worth Living" to the "To get a goo job, you need a good education", there is a range of philosophical and pragmatic reasons that people use for guidance.

BUT, let's say that we are designing a new system of society and education. Forget for a moment the practicalities of getting into college and other system-based constraints and think about how you could design education.  Would you tend towards a system based on this principle:

Learning for Use

It seems to me that this summarizes a philosophy which is a sensible basis for a system. The name has several implications, here are a few of them:

People should know things not for the sake of knowing them but for the purpose of using them.  This has implications for how people learn things since learning for recitation is different than learning for application. 

People should learning things to support what they intend to do.  A kid would wants to be a farmer should of course learn different things that then one who wants to be a fashion designer.

More later but I'm struck by how rarely I have heard this sensible term applied to education.  BTW: It's not the whole answer but I do think it's an interesting strand.