Not starting an alternative to our current higher-education system would be easier than starting one. So when things get muddled--as they always are in the early stages of planning and thinking and the miasma of sloppy uncertainty-- I need to always remember why, exactly, I'm doing this.
What is one of the more serious problems I'm trying to help solve? Maybe it's that the majority of students themselves don't have one. As in, they do what they do--study for exams, take this class here, that class there, get good grades, but have no idea why they're doing so and what problem they're working on. They're busy-bees without the vision of honey, an image I hope makes you overwhelmingly melancholy.
Another way of saying this is that they haven't developed, let alone thought about, their own ethical code. "Why am I doing what I'm doing? For the improvement of what? For the betterment of whom? What purpose will I commit to when I realize my life and energy is limited and I can't do everything? And what are the costs and benefits of following this purpose?" Anyone can do stuff. But to know why you're doing the stuff, besides that some adults told you to do that stuff, seems like a series of good questions to ask, no? And now that I'm an adult--I think--it turns out adults have no idea what they're talking about most of the time, either, because they, too, don't have an ethical code-- See Wall St. or the VW emissions cheating scandal or any of our other social clusterclucks for evidence.
Our current education system is dangerous because it confuses being busy for purpose. But as the great detective Bunk Moreland from The Wire said "A Man must have a code." And the kind of code Bunk is talking about requires more than book-learning and test-taking to develop.