I almost failed out of high school. Fortunately, I came across a program called Independent Study. It is like it sounds. By the end of my little experiment, I realized I could educate myself a lot faster than a classroom could.

Now, being a lot more mature and well-read than my 17-year-old self, I understand why you’re better off taking your education into your own hands.

1/ Pausing a movie to go to the bathroom.

We’ve all had to go to the bathroom in the middle of a movie. The thing is, when there are 20 other people watching the movie with you the odds that everyone is going to opt-in to pause while you empty that little bladder of yours is low.

The movie is obviously a metaphor for a classroom. It’s on play and the teacher intends to get through everything they need to get through in the hour they have you.

But the bathroom is a metaphor for anything that could distract you from intense learning focus.

I was a particularly distracted child but let’s be real, nobody can sustain enough focus for a full day of classes.

When you’re learning on your own, you control the pace completely. If you need to slow down because a particular section is difficult for YOU that wouldn’t necessarily be difficult for the other 20, you can.

Over any sustained period of time, slowing down when you need to and speeding up when you can, will result in a much faster pace.

2/ It’s a matter of practicality

It’s my opinion that the why for education, the holy grail for a great education, the north star an education should be aiming for, and practical usefulness.

In other words, if learning something doesn’t tangibly make your life better it’s not worth learning.

There are things that are practical by a matter of principle. Meaning they are practical for nearly everybody. For example, letters and arithmetic are in this bucket. Everybody will be able to use these skills to their benefit.

But beyond the basics, practicality has much more to do with your circumstance than general applicability.

What’s practical for me right now is education on writing, social media marketing, and JavaScript. Are those things practical for you to? Likely not so much. Even if they are, are they practical in the same way? Maybe not.

You might be learning JavaScript for a different use case than I am. In which case, if we were in a classroom together we would have to find middle ground in our use cases and learn those together.

Thereby diminishing the efficacy (fancy word for usefulness) of our time spent learning.

3/ Focus is an indication of interest

This might come as a shock to you (read: sarcasm), but if you can’t focus on something, it’s probably because you genuinely don’t care about that thing.

What you’ll find when you are learning on your own is that you tend to avoid the things you don’t care about in favor for the things you do.

In the industrial age, it made sense to coerce people into learning what was most useful for society because the name of the game was scale.

Organizations and bureaucracies gained so much size that the education system was most useful only in relation to how much it prepared people to jump into the machine.

For the Information Age, we are in now, the cost to reproduce knowledge has become so low thanks to the internet that it really doesn’t make sense for you to have the exact same education as 4 billion others.

Instead, it’s a much better bet to follow your interest and curiosity. Then you’ll have an education that’s one of a kind, not the same as the others.