Discovering THE SCHOOL OF LIFE

‣Yesterday I got one day's break. I surfed the internet,reviewed the TED speech of Atheist 2.0 by Alain de Botton and discovered an interesting project called THE SCHOOL OF LIFE started by him.

Address of the School of Life

‣I found the idea of the School of Life is rooted in his criticism on modern university. As put in his speech, the lectures in Universities, where we are all treated as independent adults, are intended to provide information, but in some way, we are all children ,we need help, we need people to tell us how to live a better life. In old days, these questions were answered though a sermon which sounds quite weird nowadays.

As a matter of fact, we lack consolation rather than information in this scary internet world. Smart as Alain de Botton, he come up with the idea to deliver the sermons in a secular way through organizing salons carried out in a small classroom located on the high street in London. People enjoyed the time of facing their weakness, improving their emotional intelligence, and won’t have trouble in mentioning about the course in front of their atheist friends.

*Website of THE SCHOOL OF LIFE*

‣Different from those abstract ones in Universities, the courses of the School of Life are very practical. The School has a passionate belief in making learning relevant – and so runs courses in the important questions of everyday life. For instance, there is a course named HOW TO FIND A JOB YOU LOVE which is just held this afternoon. Here is the brief of it:

This class is designed to help you think about what you really want from your working life and what you want to do for a living.

We start by looking at the factors that shape our career choices – from family background to personality tests – and whether these help or hinder our search for new opportunities.

We'll explore what a meaningful job would really look like – one that does more than just pay the bills and in stead expands our personal horizons.

‣Should we be pursuing money or status?

‣ How important is it to have a job that embodies your personal values or that uses your talents?

‣Is it better to be a generalist or a specialist - a wide achiever or a high achiever?

‣Will your dream job really be as satisfying as you make it out to be?

These problem is confusing for lots of people, and few of them can acquire help from a person who care them enough to give them valuable advices. Steve Blank has a clear conclusion about three different roles:

‣If you want to learn about a specific subject, find a teacher;

‣If you want to hone specific skills or reach an exact goal, find a coach;

‣If you want to get smarter and better over the course of your career, find someone who cares about you enough to be a mentor.

You can find hundreds of teachers in the campus at any time but may never run into a mentor before you are too old to call yourself a student. Maybe theSchool of Life is a good place to know someone like a mentor with a doctor degree in Psychology and not interested in your papers.

At the end of another TED speech, A KINDER GENTLER PHILOSOPHY OF SUCCESS, filmed in 2009, Chris Anderson asked Alain de Botton a question, whether he could combine the kinder, gentler philosophy of work with a successful economy.

This is a very challenging question because it has turned out to be a common sense that it is the IQ or science or technology that solve the problems such as poverty, starvation, disease ,etc. **How could emotional intelligence help?**

The answer from Alain de Botton is quite illuminating:

> The nightmare thought is that frightening people is the best way to get work out of them, and that somehow the crueler the environment the more people will rise to the challenge.

> You want to think, who would you like as your ideal dad? And your ideal dad is somebody who is tough but gentle. And it's a very hard line to make. We need fathers, as it were, the exemplary father figures in society, avoiding the two extremes, which is the authoritarian, disciplinarian, on the one hand, and on the other, the lax, no rules option.

As Paul Graham put it, **research doesn’t have to be good, but it has to be new; design doesn’t have to be new, but it has to be good.** I think these two paths converge at the top: the best design surpasses its predecessors by using new ideas, and the best research solves problems that are not only new, but worth solving. So ultimately design and research are aiming for the same destination, just approaching it from different directions.

**The School of Life is perfect model of a new and good solution for the well-being of human in this secular world.** With a combination of bringing the academic result into everyday life and a thorough thinking of what a good life is, Alain de Botton who was titled with philosopher could have no shame in saying the quote by Socrates, **THE UNEXAMINED LIFE IS NOT WORTH LIVING.**

THE END

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