Seth Godin on The Tim Ferriss Show

Tim Ferriss has done a bunch of great interviews or, more to the point, interviewed a bunch of great people well. On the latest episode, he interviewed well-known marketer Seth Godin. I enjoyed the whole show, even the bit about how to make chocolate at the end. This part about education at about 1 hour 35 minutes into the show resonated strongly with me:

Sooner or later, parents have to take responsibility for putting their kids into a system that is indebting them and teaching them to be cogs in an economy that doesn’t want cogs any more.

I’m a huge fan of public school, I sent my kids to public school. I think everyone should go to public school. It’s the great mixmaster of our world, but from 3 o’clock to 10 o’clock those kids are getting homeschooled and their either getting homeschooled watching the Flintstones or they’re getting homeschooled in learning something useful, and I think we need to teach kids two things:

1. How to lead

2. How to solve interesting problems

Because the fact is there are plenty of countries on Earth where there are people who are willing to be obedient and work harder for less money than us. So, we cannot out-obedient the competition. Therefore, we have to out-lead or out-solve the other people. […] The way you teach your kid to solve interesting problems is to give them interesting problems to solve. And then, you don’t criticize them when they fail. Kids aren’t stupid. If they get in trouble every time they try to solve an interesting problem, they’ll just go back to getting an A by memorizing what’s in the textbook.