Burn The Mold

I romanticize learning more than almost anything. I love books, ideas, philosophy, wandering minds, deep questions, slow thinking.

I both romanticize universities, and hate them at the same time. I think they keep you small. They force you into getting a permission to learn. And once they give you this really expensive permission slip, only then can you build, lead, manage, strategize, win the game.

Learning is easy. Build your own container to learn. Don’t wait to be given permission to learn.

Universities are where old men recite old books written by old men that show us how to live in an old white colonizing capitalist world.

You go in and come out the other way “obedient.” You go in and come out becoming a “yes sir” and “no sir.” Universities are a proverbial way of saying “color within the lines only.”

We can’t study and plan for a future when universities can’t even let us imagine an expansive future.

How can debt be initiation? How can compliance be part of any curriculum? How can silence be success?

I see youth energy leaking into the cracks of old institutions. Why are we still pretending this works? Why are we still telling 18-year-olds to mortgage their lives for a degree when the world they’re training for collapses every 18 months?

If something is burning, it’s not the students — it’s the system. And if something needs to burn, it’s not the future — it’s the structures that keep the future from happening.

Burn the book that was written to tame you. Burn the lecture hall that treats you like an audience instead of an imagination. Burn the idea that the only valid learning is the one you pay interest on for 20 years.

Keep the learning. Burn the limits. Keep the curiosity. Burn the compliance. Keep the mind. Burn the mold.

Young people don’t want debt. They want dangerous learning — the kind that changes their life. They want apprenticeship, experiment, community, self-direction. They want mentors, not monitors. Real-world mastery, not theory-hoarding.

They want to dismantle because they know something our elders don’t: a system can’t be reformed from inside the lecture hall it built to protect itself.

Sometimes the bravest thing a generation can do is refuse to enter the building at all.

The next era of learning won’t happen in classrooms. It will happen in eco villages, botanical gardens, collectives, pop-ups, forests, kitchens, labs, garages — and inside the minds of people who dared to imagine something better.

And that? That’s how you decolonise a system, your mind, your power and your brilliance from letting it be easily extracted.