BFU -- Accept No Substitutes

Actually there are no reasonable substitutes.

BFU is student-directed learning, the most efficient route to wisdom and understanding.

BFU is just a tool, a catalyst to empower your desire to achieve meaning in life. Self-directed, interest-based learning can profoundly enable excellence.

The substitutes you are offered against directing your own learning are the Frankenthoughts of industrial age formal schools. To discern their value to your life's passions consider their dominate marketing claims.

• "You need to do well in grade school so you can do well in high school."

• "You need to do well in high school so you can go to college."

• "You need to do well in college so you can start a good career."

Is that how you want to invest your life? Getting through college to get a job? Then getting through jobs to get retirement? Have you asked yourself about the difference between "what should I be doing?" and "what in my heart do I want to do?"

Think of all the professional careers that are now being lost to technology or lower cost providers. I recently had an initial consultation with a specialist physician on the phone. I was at his office, he could have been half a world away.

How long before they do surgery remotely, or by robot? The technology already exists or can be created by entrepreneurs. All that stops it are regulatory hurdles local doctors have captive bureaucrats draft to protect their home turf. No other profession seems to have this level of protection from competition, it won't last forever.

Decades of your life can be spent entering a career with all the promise of buggy whip specialist. Your school is not likely to tell you to quit studying a soon to be obsolete field; segmenting and dispensing knowledge is the only business they know (besides asking for more money).

You can not make a diminishing career option more valuable - the longer you stay with it the more you lose and the harder it will be to leave. You need to chart your own course and start a new journey.

What has no substitute is making yourself more valuable.

• Become a life long learner - because you have re-discovered how to love learning.

• Learn how to quit - if you are in a hole, stop digging - if the boat is sinking, get off.

• Commit - to an adaptive general life view, determined to remain flexible within it.

Everyone has a different idea of what you should do. Ultimately you will decide on your own success in life. I can't picture you saying "My life has been a success because I always conformed to others expectations."

Become a jack of all trades, and a master of one. Which one? By becoming a generalist first you increase your odds of finding that one passion that will ignite your quest for mastery.

BFU is student directed learning for visionaries and entrepreneurs.

The only satisfying success will be one you define, the only route is to self-direct your own life.

Your knowledge of an alternative to a life molded by others offers you choice. If BFU represents your journey from self discovery to self determination how could there be an acceptable substitute?

You may as well register for BFU - at no charge - right now. If you chose the satisfaction of pursuing wisdom and understanding on your own terms, you have accepted the BFU concept for which there is no substitute.


Live Your Own Life!

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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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