Educating Entrepreneurs and Visionaries

The BFU Rector received a letter from a prospective student. This scholar is already a successful consultant and was wondering if what Bastiat Free University offered would be a useful addition to his education. The following is in part, with some editorial changes, the Rector's reply.

I know many successful entrepreneurs that disdain formal schooling and yet desire to earn, not just buy, a degree. When Bastiat Free University was conceived the majority of students were expected to be those same successful entrepreneurs. Unless I am mistaken, and I frequently am, you are actually the first fitting that description to contact my office while also seriously wanting to attend BFU.

To better place you within the school, or help you decide if it has any value for you, let me ask you two questions:

1) What do you want from BFU?

2) What do you hope to accomplish in terms of learning?

There are half a dozen marketing questions I should ask - but you know those as well as I do. Your mentioning of the esteemed Richard Daughty (creator of a master's course - ed) already answered a couple of questions.

For your general interest, and to address your question on cost I will direct you to our degree information page. For a quick summary of our educational perspective read this page. These are general - I will be glad to answer your specific questions.

Application requirements are simple; add your desire to a reading of The Candle Makers' Petition. (At some future point we may require an application essay on what The Candle Makers' Petition means when applied to a college education. -ed)

All that remains is the no charge registration.

I would suggest that you check out a couple of the courses before you decide - there is no charge for investigation. To be honest the minimalist structure that now exists is not enough to direct most college students - they have been trained only to follow, not to think.

If your goal is to find a life rather than a job The Netcohort Institute is being built for you. Join the adventure - bring your most audacious dreams.

There is still a lot of work to be done at Bastiat Free University and on re-engineering education using new concepts like The Netcohort Institute. While we need entrepreneurial leaders that are adaptable and able to "think not just follow;" they will have to be educated at very different schools than now exist.

Schools like Bastiat Free University is striving to become.

Best regards,

Allan


Allan R. Wallace, Rector
Bastiat Free University

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Secret Wisdom & Hidden Logic

There is a fun read over in the financial fairy tales section of Speculation Rules. The story revolves around distilling secret wisdom and hidden knowledge into a palatable form.

In what might be a useful exercise for any of us I decided to look at distilling Bastiat Free University into an extreme elevator speech - one sentence or one word. The sentence was easy, that would be some version of our university slogan: Re-engineering higher education -- BFU offers self directed distance learning for visionaries and entrepreneurs.

One word was a lot tougher. Someday the letters BFU will represent us -- just as your name, IBM, or AT&T are a representation and distillation of essence. For now the best I can do for Bastiat Free University is probably a two word set - perhaps as above re-engineering education or maybe educational disintermediationists; either is quite a mouthful.

Educational disintermediation, cutting out the intermediary or "middle guy" in schooling, is a two word phrase that reveals a source of most current disruptions. It is a reversal of a process that happened early in the industrial age. It recognizes that educational excellence is achieved due to the desires of a motivated student -- not by the rigorous hounding of an authoritarian hierarchy.

The following is a statement made before formal and institutionalized bureaucracies reigned in what has become a moribund educational industry.

"Whatever be the qualifications of your tutors, your improvement must chiefly depend on yourselves. They cannot think or labor for you, they can only put you in the best way of thinking and laboring for yourselves. If therefore you get knowledge you must acquire it by your own industry. You must form all conclusions and all maxims for yourselves, from premises and data collected and considered by yourself. And it is the great object of New College to remove every bias the mind may be under, and to give the greatest scope for true freedom of thinking." - Joseph Priestly, Dedication of New College, London, 1794.

The process brought on by technological empowerment of individuals is both liberating our lifestyles, and it is sucking the bloat out of industrial age bureaucracies like the education industry. Disintermediated students are returning to a learning process where the student is responsible for developing their own open mind and filling it with their own useful insights. With Bastiat Free University you can start today.

Let's make this exercise more personal, what sentence or word can sum up our thoughts of the last few years?

One long sentence that may cover almost everything I've written is -- "The one size fits most society is imploding; the big bang following the collapse will spawn the creative galaxy of the netcohort society."

If I had to sum up everything I've written recently into one word it could be disintermediation.

If it has to be even shorter, one word with a lot of meanings might do quite well. That one word expression of everything is -- Change

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Is Bastiat Free University Better Than South Harmon Institute Of Technology?

The following was a preview of the movie Accepted at South Harmon Institute Of Technology. You can read it to discover more about our guesses on the movie; and to see how close we came. Then you can go see how similar you think BFU is to South Harmon. I have edited this post to add this intro, video clips, and some links.

enjoy your life,

Allan


We are going to have to see the movie Accepted to find out more about South Harmon Institute Of Technology.

Accepted will open August 18, 2006 at a theater near you.

This should be fun.

All this time Bastiat Free University has been making fun of the industrial age colleges - but in a serious way. Lets get rid of serious - and have a comedy movie make some of our points for us. (YouTube video)

Accepted the movie may be a Toto and pull back the curtains that are hiding the little man pulling the levers. South Harmon Institute Of Technology is a college created by a rejected student, rejected by eight colleges in fact. He sees his disappointed and angry college parents and devices a plan.

Acquiring an abandoned psychiatric hospital, and appointing comedian Lewis Black as dean set up the standard Hollywood ploy - lies to cover lies - until a final lie makes everything ok. Perhaps this time it will be different.

Accepted looks like it may be a mashup of Nerds and Animal House - which just might end up being very entertaining. Student-directed learning makes sense, it should also make a good movie.

In a prior post we compared Bastiat Free University and the top ranked Thunderbird, Garvin School Of International Business. Here we will do a brief comparison of Bastiat Free University and the fictional South Harmon Institute Of Technology.

Bastiat Free University and South Harmon Institute of Technology have more in common than BFuniv.com and Thunderbird.

Both BFU and SHIoT were created as a frustrated response to archaic educational bureaucracies. But I have the feeling that the poor saps at South Harmon will end up returning to a Hollywood ending that will not insult educators too much.

The common wisdom about the value of a diploma is too deeply ingrained to be easily ignored. Few will confront the fact that college degrees are losing value as they become common and as bureaucracies shrink with the ending of the industrial age. Students need to make themselves more valuable as the value of a college diploma shrinks. The world is changing even if education isn't.

BFU however is happy to either insult or ignore bureaucratic educators and their increasingly out of date and out of touch institutions. "In a time of drastic change it is the learners who inherit the future. The learned usually find themselves equipped to live in a world that no longer exists." - Eric Hoffer

The funny part here is that the heroes of the movie seem just the sort of student that Bastiat Free University was created to serve - creative and action oriented team members of the Netcohort. They need to pick up their BFU student id card.

Then they can start creating their own college courses.

If you can identify with the students from Accepted at South Harmon Institute Of Technology - come take a close look at

Bastiat Free University

an unschool for adults

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