• "Well written, well researched, and the thesis put forth is well argued.... Woods has opened up an area of historical analysis that should invite further study."
    -Journal of American History

  • "During these times that challenge our freedoms there is no one more qualified to make U.S. history relevant to the fight against big government than Thomas Woods."
    -Barry Goldwater Jr.
    Former Member of Congress

  • "I strongly recommend Woods's work."
    -The Honorable Ron Paul,
    U.S. House of Representatives

  • "Written with great clarity and fluency, making the complex philosophical and theological concepts approachable."
    -Journal of American Studies

  • "A must-read."
    -Barron's

  • "An excellent reading source for anyone interested in financial markets, and much more so for anyone interested in learning about capitalism without all the misinterpretations being thrown about in the financial media."
    -Asia Times

  • "Provocative, well-written, and deserves to be read."
    -Catholic Historical Review

  • "An engaging and important contribution to scholarship on the history of American Catholicism."
    -Journal of the Historical Society

  • "Woods and [co-author Kevin] Gutzman appeal to both left and right in this constitutionalist jeremiad…. The authors' exegeses of the Constitution and court decisions, heavy on original intent arguments, are lucid and telling."
    -Publishers Weekly

  • "A marvelous read. Every chapter taught me something new and unexpected."
    -Tom Bethell, senior editor,
    The American Spectator

  • "The hottest book today is Meltdown, by my friend Tom Woods."
    -Judge Andrew Napolitano, senior judicial analyst,
    FOX News Channel

  • "Should be required reading."
    -Economic Affairs (London)

  • "Woods, one of the best classical liberal [libertarian] scholars of his generation, has once more placed us in his debt with this lucid and tightly argued book."
    -David Gordon, The Mises Review

  • "Tom Woods is one of my dearest allies in the struggle against wrong-headed and dangerous economic policy."
    -Peter Schiff

Education Shelf Life

Derek Donohue writes:

Loved your article on LRC today about bursting the college bubble. Yahoo News, like a broken clock, can even be on point once in a while. On that same topic, Yahoo published a similar article recently that really closes the deal on the points you are making. The article (sorry for not providing a link) spoke to the fact that information has a shelf life. And in a world where we are seeing the realities of Moore’s Law, conventional educational practices cannot keep pace with the decreasing shelf life of information.

I was a physics major in college. And while physics has become such a hijacked discipline that many of the same junk theories have persisted for decades, it’s easy to point to health sciences, computer sciences, government, archeology, and more as areas where many of the established ‘facts’ are vastly different from what was being taught when I graduated from college in 1998.

For instance, consider the following standard academic questions:

What kind of government does Libya have?
Is cancer genetic?
Were dinosaurs cold blooded or warm blooded?
Who built the pyramids, how, and for what purpose?

The answers to these questions are literally changing every day, while the prevailing theories addressing them are also growing and diversifying. Similarly nobody is programming with Fortran (what I learned in the 90’s) anymore.

For this reason, the existing model of public schools and state universities are in no way equipped to even keep pace with the rapidly increasing establishment of new truths and new methodologies. And despite their marginal efforts to appear so, it is clear that they cannot compete with existing means of accessing and acquiring this information. I can Google every fact I learned in 4 years of college in under 10 minutes, for free, in my underwear at home. Thus, to even maintain a building for people to gather and do this very same thing, is not a market viable plan. For that reason, college, high school, middle school, etc etc, are dead men walking. They cannot be saved in any recognizable form. Anyone with a strong market mentality like yours knows that no “Aha” arguments are even required. This is the inescapable reality.

So as much as I love hearing it, it almost doesn’t need to be said any more. Schools are archaic, useless and will soon be unpleasant memories. If even Yahoo news can get their feeble minds around it, you can be sure the rest of us get it too. But thanks for reminding us anyway.

Unlearn the Propaganda!

  • Anonymous

    What people pay for when they get a private, Ivy League degree is name brand assessment and certification of competency in whatever field they’re degreed in. All the knowledge in your head or anybody’s head isn’t worth anything if you don’t have the reputation to get people to listen to you and/or fund your projects.

  • Garrett

    In my experience, university professors teach what they learned when they were students, which means much of what is taught is *already* expired.

    Here’s a fairly common example: in Intro Stats everyone is taught z-tests and t-tests. Statisticians created these convoluted things in the 1900′s. They needed a way to estimate probabilities by hand because they didn’t have computers to calculate them directly. Now that we have computers, z-tests and t-tests are unnecessary (and second rate), but they are still the bread and butter of Intro Stats.

  • 2014

    What is more common – guy with a degree looking for funding his business or guy with a degree looking for a job?
    Who would you fund – guy with a degree or guy with know-how?

    “Ivy League degree is name brand assessment and certification of competency” Brand – yes, competency certification – hardly any. If it was the case you would get there, pass the test and go with a certificate. It’s a school not a certification institution.

Find me on Google