In our previous reading, Secrets of Buccaneer Scholar by James Marcus Bach, we identified Bach’s main concern of education being more important than school. He believes that institutional learning settings where we take multiple test is not the way of learning, but rather restricting us. Education is far more than school and can be obtained anywhere we go.

Rene Descartes’s Discourse on the Method of Rightly Conducting the Reason, and seeking Truth in the Sciences supports Bach’s theory/lens. Rene Descartes attended one of the finest schools in Europe. He was a good student and believed “that by their help a clear and certain knowledge of all that is useful in life might be acquired, I was ardently desirous of instruction” (Descartes). Rene Descartes believed what he learned in school would help in life later on. However after Descartes finished his studies, he was in doubt. He stated, “But as soon as I had finished the entire course of study, at the close of which it is customary to be admitted into the order of the learned, I completely changed my opinion” (Descartes). He had problems he couldn’t solve with the material he learned in school. Descartes change of mind about school supports Bach’s theory because Bach believed that school is not an effective way of educating yourself. After, Descartes completely abandoned his studies and “resolved no longer to seek any other science than the knowledge of myself, or of the great book of the world” (Descartes).  He spent his time traveling and “collecting varied experience, in proving myself in the different situations into which fortune threw me, and, above all, in making such reflection on the matter of my experience as to secure my improvement” (Descartes). Descartes was building onto his knowledge even when he was not in school. Descartes’s adventure proves Bach’s idea of being able to educate yourself everywhere you go.

John Locke’s An Essay concerning Human Understandings also supports Bach’s theory of education. In Locke’s essay, he says we have no innate principles in mind. Innate means being in the mind when we were born. John Locke answers the question, “Whence has it all the materials of reason and knowledge?” with a one word answer: experience. “From experience: in that all our knowledge is founded” says Locke. He provides us with an example, “that if a child were kept in a place where he never saw any other but black and white till he were a man, he would have no more ideas of scarlet or green, than he that from his childhood never tasted an oyster or a pine-apple has of those particular relishes” (Locke). As Bach said, children should not be trapped in school and should go out to the world to educate themselves. With experience comes knowledge and education.