I've written about the plateau effect and the importance of reinventing yourself. Here's the thing...
Kids are curious and open to learning new things. When you're a kid, you try on different possibilities.
When you get older, you lose your curiosity. You also lose your ability to be flexible about who you are.
This happens gradually. You drop the desire to grow once you reach a presumed high-water mark of achievement. You lose the ability to offer something extraordinary.
But it also means you're limiting how much the world can offer you.
Giving up on growth means no longer engaging with the world from a spontaneous and alive place.
I'm not saying this is easy. It usually takes a disaster or a breakdown for people to make this kind of shift.
I get smug if I'm right about too many things for too long. If the world isn't going to do something to humble me, I need to do that for myself.
Put yourself in an environment that you like but which triggers you. I'll give you an example.
At one point, I went from being an English professor to a software engineer. Those are very different fields.
I was competent in one domain. In an entirely new domain, the comfort-seeking part of me was freaking out. I wanted to be there, but I felt utterly unprepared. It was awesome. I looked around and believed that everyone else knew what they were doing. I felt like an imposter until eventually I loved how it felt not to fit in.
St Vincent's School for Mature Adults
The concept of 'school-children' makes us think of education as happening to children. This shuts out such ideas as split education. There could be education up to the age of fifteen and then another short period at twenty-five and again at forty-five and sixty. These short periods would be six months or a year. The idea would be to equip people directly for the years ahead of them. Thus, the needs of a fifteen-year old are different from the needs and interests of a sixty-year old. It would also give people more opportunity to change their lives and jobs instead of having them fixed at an early age when there is nothing on which to base the choice.
- Edward De Bono
People go back to school as 40+ year-olds all the time. Whether to finish a degree, get a new one, or prove it to themselves, that's great. But we can go farther.
We should normalize the phenomenon of older people continuing their education. Completely revamp how we think higher education should look. Most people are unhappy with it anyway.
Higher education gets criticized because it's expensive (it is) and because we expect that degree = job stability. On top of this, universities are starting to look more and more like homogenous edu-corporations.
I have always idealized the university as an enlightened institution. And to some extent, they are. None are perfect, but time spent in such an environment is immensely valuable. In college, challenges come at you from all directions, but more importantly, you're surrounded by other people who are similarly challenged. We look back at the education phase of life as if it belongs to an early part and no other.
It doesn't need to be this way.
The self-education potential right now is incredible. Resources are freely available or readily obtainable. But you don't always know what you need. You need peer groups who know you and understand where you want to go.
New Curriculum
What would this middle-aged school teach?
Imagine yourself turning 40. It's your first day of school again. You're grouped with a bunch of people your age, regardless of LinkedIn status or family obligations.
The subject matter would differ from what you learned as a 25-year-old.
Financial Skills
Important at all ages, people prioritize different things at different phases of life. Incoming 40-year-olds may have just counted themselves lucky to cross the threshold of home ownership and want to do some financial life planning so their investments are secure for later life.
Life/Death Planning
Maybe people could have a class in which they decide their death plan. Death is going to happen whether you like to think of it or not, so now that you're grown up, what do you want your funeral to be like? Do you want to be cremated, launched from a cannon, or painted, pumped full of chemicals, and put in an expensive single-use box?
Crafts and Arts
Let's say you've had a pleasant, stable, and satisfying career up to this point. You've focused on achieving a high degree of success in one area of life. How amazing would it be to have a universally sanctioned transition into a life with better creative capacity? Not just a one-off writing workshop or a drink-wine-and-paint course for fun, but as something to really put yourself into?
Relationship Advice
If you're turning 40, this curriculum is long overdue, but better late than never. With everyone in the same boat, students could learn new and advanced modalities of relating to themselves and others. Everyone would be tested on their sensitivity to the fact that they have feelings and that there's value in vulnerability.
Meditation and Yoga
As I was taught, ancient yoga was often something people chose to dedicate themselves to later in life. They lived a full life—had a vocation, spouse, kids, engaged in the world—and then they chose to renounce it all and went into a hut or a cave to meditate and do yoga from that point forward. This was a renunciate style of yoga, the idea being that if you're going to renounce life, you must experience life first.
New Worldviews
What better time to take up new activities and be challenged into new ways of thinking and new belief systems?
What's better is that this university for the middle-aged wouldn't have to carry the burden of preparing people for a singularly important career.
Re-Socialization
You're sitting there in class with other people your age, connecting with a slice of the population. There'd be clubs, sports, performances, all the rest.
If you're unhappy with your current social circle, you'd get to return to school and form a new one.
School Once, School Again
I'd love it if we all had the liberty to graduate school at 15 and experience the world in some professional capacity, but without the expectation that this is anything more than an experimentation phase.
College would begin at 25. This is late by our current standard, but you'd benefit from more preparation and experience beforehand.
Then, at 40, you can go back. You've accomplished something, had serious relationships, and are ready to reflect and broaden into yourself and anticipate what the next stage will bring. Maybe you want to move into a different line of work entirely. I think most people would.
Someone could spend ten years between 15 and 25 doing nothing but surfing and basking in nature, and they'd still be able to attend college with everyone else.
If you miss one window, it's not a problem to go back to school later—everyone else is anyway.
Shiny New Problems
I offer all this as a thought experiment to shake loose from the belief that people should be normal and follow a prescribed path. Adopting such a system would create new problems.
But it would be a lot more interesting.