Seth Godin has written an incredible e-book about the current status of our school system and digging deep to answer the question, “What is school for?”

The book challenges the current school system and calls it out for churning out millions of workers who are trained to do 1925-style labor.  As Godin states early in the text, “The goal of this manifesto is to create a new set of questions and demands that parents, taxpayers, and kids can bring to the people they’ve chosen, the institution we’ve built and invested our time and money into.  The goal is to change what we get when we send citizens to school.”

Here are some tweet-sized quotes from the book:

Large-scale education was not developed to motivate kids or to create scholars. It was invented to churn out adults who worked well within the system.

The question I’d ask every administrator and school board is, “Does the curriculum you teach now make our society stronger?”

Sure, education is expensive, but living in a world of ignorance is even more expensive.

Our culture has a dreaming problem.  It was largely created by the current regime in schooling, and it’s getting worse.

Learning is not done to you.  Learning is something you choose.

Can we teach kids to care enough about their dreams that they’ll care enough to develop the judgment, skill, and attitude to make them come true?

When did we decide that the purpose of school was to cram as much data/trivia/fact into every student as much as we possibly could?

Now that obedience is less important and learning matters more than ever, we have to be brave enough to separate them.  We can rebuild the entire system around passion instead of fear.

Competence is the enemy of change.

Real learning happens in bursts, and often those bursts occur in places or situations that are out of the ordinary.  Textbooks rarely teach us lessons we long remember.

Teach students how to learn, not how to be perfect.

College can’t merely be high school, but louder.

When we teach a child to make good decisions, we benefit from a lifetime of good decisions.

This book is a challenging read and well worth the time spend thinking about the future of our education system.  Click here to download your copy for free.