On the Road Less Traveled to Education and Careers

Current, former or prospective students – and students of life in general — can learn a lot from A cheaper, smarter road to college, and career, a triple book review by novelist Caroline Leavitt, who writes about self-help for The Boston Globe. The piece focuses on three intriguing-sounding books that aim to help people travel down unconventional roads to learning and self-development: The New Global Student: Skip the SAT, Save Thousands on Tuition, and Get a Truly International Education (by Maya Frost, founder of Education Design Institute), You Majored in What?: Mapping your Path from Chaos to Career (by Katharine Brooks, director of career services for the College of Liberal Arts at the University of Texas, and Psychology Today blogger) and How to Love (by psychiatrist Gordon Livingston, also a Psychology Today blogger).  Since so many people are looking for new ways of thinking about life,  these titles seem timely and provocative. Leavitt favorably compares How to Love to Erich Fromm’s The Art of Loving. Frost’s book is partially based on the decidedly unconventional higher education experience of her four daughters, which involved traveling far beyond their comfort zone to go to college. I was particularly drawn to Leavitt’s description of the “wise wandering” approach in Brooks’ book, “a system of positive psychology, chaos theory, and visual mapping techniques to help students – and anyone – figure out what skills they have, what personal values matter most to them, and how to channel it all into a career they’ll love.”