By Tom Woods

One of my all-time favorite fiction writers, and indeed one of the greatest of our time, thinks he did the right thing by not going to college.

I’m talking about Ray Bradbury.

He once said:

I’m completely library educated. I’ve never been to college. I went down to the library when I was in grade school in Waukegan, and in high school in Los Angeles, and spent long days every summer in the library….

With the library it’s like catnip, I suppose: you begin to run in circles because there’s so much to look at and read. And it’s far more fun than going to school, simply because you make up your own list and you don’t have to listen to anyone. When I would see some of the books my kids were forced to bring home and read by some of their teachers, and were graded on — well, what if you don’t like those books?

Elsewhere he wrote:

I discovered me in the library. I went to find me in the library. Before I fell in love with libraries, I was just a six-year-old boy. The library fueled all of my curiosities, from dinosaurs to ancient Egypt.

When I graduated from high school in 1938, I began going to the library three nights a week. I did this every week for almost ten years and finally, in 1947, around the time I got married, I figured I was done. So I graduated from the library when I was twenty-seven. I discovered that the library is the real school.

Aspiring writers, he said, are not going to learn to write in college:

You can’t learn to write in college. It’s a very bad place for writers because the teachers always think they know more than you do—and they don’t. They have prejudices. They may like Henry James, but what if you don’t want to write like Henry James? They may like John Irving, for instance, who’s the bore of all time. A lot of the people whose work they’ve taught in the schools for the last thirty years, I can’t understand why people read them and why they are taught.

We don’t need to imagine what Bradbury would have thought about the woke cult on the campuses nowadays, because he pretty much told us.

“There is more than one way to burn a book,” he once said. “And the world is full of people running about with lit matches.”

Remember that in Bradbury’s novel Fahrenheit 451, the censorship didn’t come from above, from an oligarchy seeking to control people’s minds. It came from below:

It didn’t come from the Government down. There was no dictum, no declaration, no censorship, to start with, no! Technology, mass exploitation, and minority pressure carried the trick, thank God. Today, thanks to them, you can stay happy all the time, you are allowed to read comics, the good old confessions, or trade journals…. Magazines became a nice blend of vanilla tapioca.

Don’t step on the toes of the dog lovers, the cat lovers, doctors, lawyers, merchants, chiefs, Mormons, Baptists, Unitarians, second-generation Chinese, Swedes, Italians, Germans, Texans, Brooklynites, Irishmen, people from Oregon or Mexico….

On the 40th anniversary of that novel’s publication, Bradbury was asked about what he thought of political correctness — as if it wasn’t obvious from his work.

He replied:

Someone said to me recently, aren’t you afraid? No, I said, I never react in fear; I react in anger. As with graffiti, you must counterattack within the moment, not a day, a month, or a year later. All the politically correct terrorists must be driven back into the stands. There is no place for them in the open field of democratic ballplaying.

And later he said: “Whether you’re a majority or minority, bug off! To hell with anybody who wants to tell me what to write.”

I might add this little gem, because I can’t resist: “I don’t believe in government. I hate politics. I’m against it. And I hope that sometimes this fall, we can destroy part of our government, and next year destroy even more of it. The less government, the happier I will be.”

Three takeaways from all this for 2023:

(1) If you or your child wants to avoid college but doesn’t know how to prosper otherwise, we’ve got excellent alternatives for you.
(2) If you or your child are entering a technical field for which there is no plausible alternative to college, we can show you how to do it debt free.
(3) “College” is not the beginning and end of your education. You can learn plenty on your own. And that includes not just academic subjects. A support group full of like-minded people who aren’t going to pounce on you for wrongthink and who can advise and encourage you when you’re starting a business or getting in shape or writing a book, or whatever, is essential.

We have all these things inside my School of Life, which will be closing its doors in the blink of an eye.

Here’s what a whole bunch of people say about what it’s done for them (scroll down at the link), and how you too can use it to prosper and flourish in a world that can’t stand the sight of you:
http://www.tomwoods.com/voices

Tom Woods