The SelfReliant Educational Philosophy: Focusing on Self-Driven Experience

Where do we get our interests, passions, desires, and curiosities? We're always told that life will be drudgery if you don't find work that really motivates you and gets you excited to wake up in the morning. The best way to determine your interests is to explore your curiosities, and whereas traditional higher education settings only allow you to have this sort of exploration on the day you choose your courses from a catalogue, the Internet feeds curiosities 24/7, all over the world, and practically at any location thanks to mobile devices.

Your particular curiousity landscape may not be defined well by a curriculum or a course schedule, which is created in a "one size fits all" fashion. Let's say at 3 PM on Tuesday you want to learn about fire ants. By 7 PM you could practically be an expert on those little creepy crawlies, after combing through resources on Google Scholar, looking up entymology blogs, and reading the relevant entries (and their references) on Wikipedia - you could even set up a voice chat meeting with a local entymology expert. That 4 hours of your time was surely spent productively in intellectual pursuit and it satisfied a curiousity, so it brought you closer to defining your interests and passions. This can certainly happen in a school setting, but since it hasn't, you're left wondering why your genuine, self-driven learning experience can't "count" for something. Why can't learning in this way be accredited, evaluated, or validated somehow by academia?

This type of learning is what SelfReliant LLC is most passionate about - it's what gets us to wake up in the morning (along with a good cup of coffee). Above all, learning needs to be fun, because finding your purpose is going to be a life-long pursuit, but seeing education as drudgery will inevitably stall that journey.

Before concluding this section, I'd like to recommend two books that influenced SelfReliant's educational philosophy deeply: Revolutionary Wealth by Alvin Toffler and Informal Learning by Jay Cross both of which Alex has reviewed on Amazon. View his profile and book reviews here.

For those of you wondering just what a 'microenterprise' is, and how it fits into this approach to education (or for visual learners who want to see a nifty graphic) please continue to the Microenterprise Institute page...