James Marcus Bach in Secrets of a Buccaneer Scholar briefly touches upon “happiness” in schools. “If you’re not happy, [then] leave…” Bach writes, allowing me to draw a connection with this statement of his to a TEDxTalk video I watched a few years ago. Logan LaPlante, then thirteen, explains how “hackschooling,” or simply receiving education through nontraditional means, permitted him to incorporate being happy and healthy into his education (“Hackschooling Makes Me Happy”). In his speech, he suggests basing education on the study and practice of being happy and healthy, which focuses on exercise, contribution and service, time in nature, and recreation to name only a few (“Hackschooling”). We have all come under the notion that school is equivalent to education but that is not necessarily so. Like what James Bach had said in his book, “education is so much more than school.” Logan is an ideal example and to explain this, Logan allows us to take a look at the type of education he’s been receiving. He tells us that community organizations play a big part in his education where he is often learning outside the traditional learning environment (“Hackschooling”). To learn how to survive in the wilderness, for example, he would physically be in the wilderness listening to nature and sensing his surroundings instead of being restricted to a classroom imagining hypothetical “if you were stranded on an island” scenarios (“Hackschooling”). It’d be a great experience to take a step out of the classroom and learn by looking at the world from a different perspective but to do so, one must have the courage, the confidence, the motivation, and the bit of luck Bach had to prove all the others that school isn’t a necessity to succeed.

Maybe it’s time for me to reconsider my possibilities.