“What do you want to be when you grow-up?” is the question that every single person on the planet has been asked at least a thousand times. To this day, I still don’t even know and I am about to graduate. However, I am not alone. It is a known fact that most of the people who graduate with a specific major will most likely not end up working within their major. Why is this? We can go around and around talking about the job market, recessions and how corporations and firms just aren’t hiring anyone without the needed experience, but what is the real underlying issue. While economics has a huge role, traditional education is the other piece of the pie. From elementary to high school, we have been tailored to think about going to college, making a living, and having a family. We are taught that is will maximize our happiness, or utility, if you will. But what happens when you do just that and end up unhappy in the process? Well the average person will search for something to make them happy, which in extreme cases could lead to divorce, quitting a job, and spending more money, but that could potentially and most likely decrease your utility or personal happiness even more. So now we raise the question of “How can we prevent this?” In comes the new term “Hackschooling” coined by 13-year old Logan Laplante. Hackschooling means your schooling is based on an individual’s interests, what makes you happy. If you were like me in any way, you would immediately be skeptical and may be thinking “how on Earth is school supposed to make you happy. I mean it is designed as a form of torture right?” At least this is what I first thought; however, as I began to work through the idea, hackschooling in short-term leads to a maximizing your utility as a child, which in turn allows you to be innovative in your interests and also creating opportunities that you would have never had in a traditional school setting. Speaking in the long term, wouldn’t you think this would help our Economy? People would be doing things they like and have a passion for. They could go to college knowing exactly what they want to do, and thrive in it. They wouldn’t have to switch their majors ten times, or take 6 years to graduate leading to more and more student loans, which is another economic issue in this day and age. They might be able to get a career started right after college because they have had opportunity and experience in that field throughout their entire education.
I thought about this question before. I was good at painting when I was at elementary school. I could stay at one pose and painted for the whole afternoon. But when I went to middle school, I decided to focus on studying but drop out painting. And most of my friends did the same thing. We did so because we thought that it was difficult for people to find jobs in painting area, or either get lower-paid. Although we have passion for painting and we love painting, but money is the major concern for us at that time. This is the world, but not the fairy tale, sometimes people can’t do whatever they want.