学校，让我们学会了碌碌无为

2017年11月29日

当斯科特·杨 被大学录取时，他是幸运的。

Scott Young was lucky when he got accepted to college.

因为，他没有经历很多人都经历过的那种痛苦：在海量的专业选择之间，无所适从。

Because he didn't suffer what most people have suffered: Feeling totally lost among all those choices in majors.

他成功地把专业选项缩减到2个：商科和计算机科学。

He managed to narrow down his choice in major to two choices: Business and computer science.

他对两者都非常感兴趣。其中一个让你可以建立公司，而另一个让你可以创造技术。

He was really interested in both. With one you get to build companies, with the other you get to build technologies.

不过，在他们学校里，你最终只能选一个专业。

But in his school he could only major in one.

于是他做了任何一个大一新生都会做的事：一个严密、理性的成本-收益分析：

So he did what any freshman would do, and did a careful rational cost-benefit analysis:

性别比

Gender Ratio

因为这个原因，他最终选了商科。

So business it was.

而且，毕业后的他也完全没有遗憾。

And after graduating he had no regrets.

但是在结束了大学教育之后，他却一直对自己没有选的那条路心怀渴望。

But after finishing his education, he had this longing for the path not taken.

他真的很想学计算机科学。

He really wanted to learn computer science.

但是，回学校读书对他来说已经没有什么吸引力了。

But going back to school didn’t appeal to him.

他不想再花4年时间，不想再应付一次招生委员会，不想再交学费，不想仅仅为了满足好奇心就推迟自己的人生并背一大笔债。

Four more years of his life? Acceptance boards? Tuition bills? He didn’t want to postpone his life and rack up debt, just to pursue a curiosity.

更重要的一个问题是：对于大部分人来讲，学校真的是一个适合学习的地方吗？

And there is a more important question: For most people, is school really an appropriate place to study?

并不一定吧。

Not quite so, right?

当你需要跟着一个系统的步调来行动的时候，

When you have to adjust your own pace according to a system,

当你需要应付一大堆形式主义的事情的时候，

when you have to deal with a whole bunch of pointless procedures,

当你身边有一群同样虚度光阴的人在互相安慰的时候，

when you have the mutual consolation from all those people who wastes their time just like you do,

你的学习效率能有多高？

how high could your efficiency possibly be?

你真的能学到多少东西吗？

Can you really learn anything?

对于很多人来说，学校并没有给他们创造一个学习的环境，反而让他们学会了碌碌无为。

For the majority, school didn't give them an environment to study. It taught them how to stay busy in vain.

而且，这背后还有一个更严重的问题。

And there is someting else way more serious behind all these.

一方面，教育成本对学生和政府来说都越来越难负担；但另一方面，雇主们要的是一个受过教育的劳动力大军。

On one hand the cost is becoming harder for both students and governments to bear. But in the other hand employers are demanding an educated workforce.

他们要的，是具备复杂分析技巧的雇员。现在全世界急缺的不光是自然资源，还有优质的脑力劳动。

They want employees with complex analytical skills. The world now runs out of what we dig out of people’s brains not just what we dig out of the ground.

对，这就是问题的症结。

So, that’s the problem.

那，怎么解决呢？嗯，实话讲，他完全不知道。

Now what’s the fix? Well, he had no idea.

不过，他认为，可能我们一直以来寻求答案的方向是错的。

But what he did want to suggest is that maybe we’ve been looking in the wrong place.

教育，可能并不需要这么昂贵，而且甚至不需要学校。

Maybe an education doesn’t need to be expensive. Maybe it even doesn't need to have anything to do with school.

从某些方面讲，我们在没有学校的情况下可能可以学得更好。

From some aspects, maybe we can learn better without school.

而这正是 斯科特·杨 面临的问题。

And that was exactly the problem which Scott Young were facing.

他想要的是教育，而不是学校。

He wanted the education, not the school.

然后，他想起来，像麻省理工、斯坦福和哈佛这样的大学都有把课程免费放到网上的习惯。

And then he remembered that Universities like MIT, Stanford and Harvard, had a habit of putting up classes online for free.

他以前上过几次这种课，而这时他突然有了一个点子：如果你能用这种方法学一门课，为什么不直接学完一个学位呢？

He had done a few of these before and then a thought occurred to him. If you could learn a class, why not an entire degree.

于是，实验就这么开始了。

So that was the beginning of the experiment.

他建立起一个包含33门课的课表，这和一个麻省理工学生要用到的课表几乎是一模一样的，只有一两门课有点小区别。

He build a curriculum of 33 classes, that with one or two minor exceptions was identical to the course list an MIT student would use.

而他建立这个课表时用的全是麻省理工放在网上的免费资源。

And he was able to build this using only MIT’s free online available information.

唯一的花费就是买了些教科书。这意味着这个项目对他来说还不超过2000美元。

The only cost was for a few text books which meant he could follow this entire program for under $2000.

好，现在他既有目标也有资源了。

Okay. So he had his goal and now he had the material.

接下来是困难的部分：真的学完这些课程。

Now for the hard part: actually learning MIT classes.

麻省理工是个很难毕业的学校，即使对聪明的学生来说也是臭名昭著地难。

MIT is a really hard school, it’s notoriously difficult even for bright students.

而且，斯科特还没法得到教员、教授和同学的帮助。

And what’s more, he was not going to have the help of faculty, professors and classmates.

不过，后面这个问题，深想一下或许是个伪命题。

But that last point didn’t ring true for him.

因为，当他上大学的时候，他也去过学校里的各种讲座，一个教授在里面会对着300个学生讲课。

Because when he went to college, he did went to the lecture halls, where the professor would give a talk to an auditorium full of 300 students.

的确，如果他有问题就可以直接举手，但如果他有什么不懂的，最终只能自己学着去解决。

Yeah, sure that if he had a question he could rise his hand, but if he really didn’t understand something it was up to him to learn it.

所以，对于自助学位的疑虑，可能更多地来自于它的不同寻常，而非它比正统求学更难。

So perhaps the doubts and worries over do-it-yourself degree, had more to do with it being unconventional, than it being genuinely more difficult than a formal program.

而事实是，当他开始学前几门课程的时候，他得到的结果甚至比这个还要惊人。

And the truth is that as he started doing the first few classes, his results were even more surprising than that.

他发现用这种方法学习的速度比他以前在大学里学习的速度要快多了。

He found he was able to learn faster using this approach than he ever had while in university.

目前看来，这并不是一个障碍，事实证明不去MIT反而让他的学习容易了不少。

So far from being an obstacle, it turned out that not going to MIT had made his job a lot easier.

实际上，他甚至比那些直接去学校上学的人更有优势。

In fact, he had more advantages than those who did go to MIT.

而要讲这个优势，我们就得介绍一个工具：时间日志。

And if we are going to talk about these advantages, we need to introduce a tool here: TimeLog.

时间日志是这样用的：

And here is how the TimeLog works.

你记下你做每件事的起始时间和完成时间。

You jot down the starting and the stopping times for every activity you do.

记住，是所有的事，包括你早上几时起床，以及你什么时候出去倒垃圾。

And remember. We are talking about every activity, from when you wake up in the morning, to when you take out the garbage.

只要你用过这个工具一次，你就会觉得自己发现了新世界。

If you do one, the results can be eye-opening.

对于“我的时间都用在什么地方了”这一问题，绝大部分人一直都在骗自己。

Most people have been lying to themselves about where the time was going.

你以为自己一周工作60小时，其实远没有那么多。

What you thought was a 60-hour workweek wasn’t even close.

你本以为你花在洗盘子上的时间有几小时，而实际上只有几分钟。

You would have guessed you spent hours doing dishes when in fact you spent minutes.

在很大一部分时间里，你其实都是在网上闲逛或在家里瞎转悠，并不知道到底要干什么。

You spent long stretches of time lost on the Internet or puttering around the house, unsure exactly what you were doing.

而学生人群的情况要糟糕得多。

The situation is even worse for students.

学生所花的绝大部分时间都没有用在学习上，而是用在了去上课的路上、在星巴克抄笔记、或者是在讲座上尽力不睡着。

The vast majority of time students spend, isn’t spent learning, it’s spent commuting to class, copying notes at Starbucks, and trying to stay awake in lectures.

如果你能把学生用在“形成新见解”和“记住新要点”上的时间加总，换句话说就是用在学习上的时间，你会发现它其实很少。

If you could total up the amount of time that students spend forming new insights, and remembering facts which is of course what learning is, it would be tiny.

而这很大程度上并不是学生的错。

And for the most part, this is not even the student’s fault.

毕竟，企业家们也常常发现自己在刚创业时和公司做大时的产出率完全不一样。

After all, entrepreneurs often notice a startling difference in their productivity, at a start-up versus a big firm.

大机构意味着官僚主义。

Big institutions mean bureaucracy.

它们意味着更多的纸面流程，意味着你得做上级告诉你的事而不是真正重要的事。

They mean paper work, they mean doing what you’re told instead of what’s important.

所以，像 斯科特·杨 这样把自我教育当成创业来做的人，比那些在正规系统里学习的人更有学习优势。

So being an educational entrepreneur like Scott Young can therefore offer some learning advantages over people in a formal system.

而结果是，他确实做得比那些人好。

And the result is that he did had done better than those people.

他仅仅用1年就学完了麻省理工4年的课程。

It took him only 1 year to complete 4 years' worth of MIT courses.

我们说的“完成”是指：通过了期末考试，而且完成了相关的编程项目。

And by completed we mean that he had passed those final exams and he did the programming projects associated with those classes.

斯科特·杨的这个壮举，将他送上了TED演讲的舞台。

This great accomplishment of Scott Young sent him to the stage of TED.

也让他有机会像全球的人分享自己 DIY 教育的经验。

It gave him the chance to share to the world how he DIYed his own education.

我们一直指望学校和政府能带来改变，但有没有可能，其实是我们自己该改变呢？

We’ve been expecting change to come from schools and governments, but what if the change came from us.

学校或许不会消失，因为它也有它存在的必要。

Schools will not disappear. They are still necessary in some way.

但是，它的局限性毕竟还是太大了。

But what they can bring us are really limited.

未来的主流，必定是自我教育。

The mainstream in the future will surely be self-education.