Episode 166 - Zak Slayback, Helping to Reclaim Education

Zak Slayback is an entrepreneur who writes on issues of education, innovation, and philosophy. He is an Ivy League dropout and speaks regularly on education, college, how and why to foster more entrepreneurship, and issues related to professional development. He believes that entrepreneurs are the primary actors of social change.

Zak is a founding team member of Praxis.

He was one of LinkedIn’s most influential voices on education in 2015 and has been published at Newsweek, the New York Examiner, the Daily Caller, the Pittsburgh Post Gazette, the Christian Science Monitor, the Foundation for Economic Education’s Anything Peaceful, among others, and has also appeared on The Glenn Beck Program and HuffPost Live.

He’s spoken at Coin Congress SFO, The Thiel Foundation Summit, regional Students For Liberty conferences, and elsewhere.

Zak lives in and works from Pittsburgh, PA. Feel free to contact him if you are visiting and want to grab coffee.

Email: zak@slayback.xyz

Website: zakslayback.com

twitter @zslayback

Recommended Resourses:

Zak's own book, "The End of School: Reclaiming Education from the Classroom"

Free to Learn: Why Unleashing the Instinct to Play Will Make Our Children Happier, More Self-Reliant, and Better Students for Life by Peter Gray

The Underground History of American Education: A School Teacher's Intimate Investigation Into the Problem of Modern Schooling by John Taylor Gatto

Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder (Incerto) by Nassim Nicholas Taleb

YouTube Feed:

Quotes: "What's good in like the 60s and 70s and 80s needs to be good for somebody in 2010, 2012, 2016 is kind of stupid."

"I meet people are like, "I'm gonna go get a masters degree." "Why you gonna go get a masters degree?" "Is going to more doors for me." That's not necessarily true, one it takes time and there's an opportunity cost to the time you're in school and the time you spend four years in university it is four years you could be doing other things."

"I think that self-learning, unlearning, and relearning is not just something that you need to do throughout your life but with the way the economy is developing today, is a moral imperative."

"School is the place where 'knowing how to learn' goes to die."

" I know so many people that are like, "Oh, I'm no good at math." No, you're probably actually fine at math, just associated math was suffering while you're growing up, but because you have no context to it."

"I've learned that learning how to learn and knowing how to learn is one of the most important and least appreciated skills out there."

"The most valuable skill you have is that you know how to learn."

"The most dangerous part of school in particular, is that it associates learning with work (or pain)."

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