Educa tion for the
REAL WORLD
By Shawn Cohen
A few years ago, I was a 25-
year-old homeschool grad
without a bachelor’s degree.
But I didn’t think I needed
one either—after all, I
worked in the editorial
department of a Christian publishing company
and loved it. All of a sudden, though, God gave
me a thirst for something different. I wanted to
be a writer, and God made it clear that getting a
bachelor’s degree in English would be a step in
the right direction.
A year later, I had my fully accredited degree
in hand because I did something that any
student can do: I took ownership of my education and didn’t conform to the university system
that thousands of students adopt every year.
Through a distance–learning process called
“credit by exam,” using CLEP®, DANTES, and
similar exams, I completed my degree with
superior quality in a fraction of the time and at
a fraction of the cost. Additionally, I combined
my education with a super internship that gave
me hands-on experience while I was completing
my degree.
120 Finishing the Race
T HE DEFINITION
O F A TRUE EDUCATION
While working on my degree, I found that
e ducation entails much more than reiterating the
r antings of professors and conforming to their
i deology just to get a good grade. Part of this
r evelation occurred when I realized that the first
two years of college are usually nothing more
than a review of high school. In fact, the concept
of “high school” has existed for approximately a
century. Yet, it’s one of those social institutions
that seems like it’s existed since the dawn of
creation (kind of like federal income tax).
Homeschooling parents are proficient at
thinking outside the box, and statistics show that
homeschooled grads are succeeding in the world.
However, many families still educate their children the world’s way, with a grade-segregated,
fact-emphasis approach. The fact that this philosophy of “schooling” stems from the social engineering of industrialist magnates in the early
twentieth century, men like Andrew Carnegie and
John D. Rockefeller, Sr., is well documented.
Because the large corporations these men
directed were in need of unskilled manual labor,
they devised a system that would, in their words,
