Lifelong Learning Endowment

In order to maintain my Parenting License, Middle Class, in good standing, each month I shovel a not insignificant portion of my earnings into 429 plans for the future college education of my kids.

By “not insignificant,” I mean the amount it would take for me to save $552,000, the projected amount I will need to send my two kids to the college I attended.

That’s a lot of money, especially for someone like me, who completely wasted his college years. Unable to shake the ever-present delusion of self-justification, I can’t escape the feeling that my kids will waste their college years too, which makes the prospect of blowing $552,000 even harder to take.

Having wasted my college years, and most of the years before college too, and therefore having gotten through life pretty much on what I’ve figured out on my own, I place little value on formal education, disdaining its rigid one-size-fits-all pedagogical model, its fetishistic reliance on objective but meaningless facts and figures, its sports-addled pep rally-style of conditioned social conformity and its artificial and other-directed Pavlovian system of grade-based rewards. That’s another reason I can’t imagine dropping $552,000 into our halls of higher learning.

(Interestingly, I’ve found that those auto-didacts who did not attend college tend to worship the idea of college, idealizing it to an unhealthy degree.)

But I place a very high value on an informal, but self-directed and lifelong, education. So high, in fact, that over my life I’ve spent thousands upon thousands of hours and dollars on my own educational pursuits, most of them through books. The other day, as I tore open yet another box filled with books ordered online, each another lesson on my lifelong syllabus, it occurred to me that maybe there was a better use for that $552,000 I am so assiduously saving.

What if I split it in half, $276,000 for each of my kids, and with that set up an endowment to fund their own lifelong learning endeavors? Call it a “Lifelong Learning Endowment.” If conservatively invested and spent, the Lifelong Learning Endowments would allow each of my kids to spend about $200 each and every week over their entire lives on self-directed educational endeavors. They could blow it all on books, like me, or they could save it for lectures, pottery lessons, world travel or whatever. And that $200 would be in real, inflation-adjusted dollars, so it should grow with inflation, ensuring that throughout their lives they will always have enough money to meet their educational needs.

And they would never spend the principal, so when they died there’d be at least $276,000 available to seed Lifelong Learning Endowments for their kids, grandkids or other deserving youth, thereby passing the spark of lifelong learning along to future generations.

Which do you think is the better buy – $276,000 given to a college in exchange for four years of fun, frivolity and, possibly, a little bit of learning, or $276,000 to a Lifelong Learning Endowment for a lifetime’s worth of self-directed learning?

I’m so excited about the possibilities of the Lifelong Learning Endowment, I don’t even care if it causes them to downgrade me to the dreaded Parenting License, Lower Class.