Here is a radical truth: school doesn’t have a monopoly on learning. More and more people are passing on traditional education and college degrees. Instead they’re getting the knowledge, training, and inspiration they need outside of the classroom. Drawing on extensive research and talking to over 100 independent learners, Kio Stark offers the ultimate guide to learning without school. Don’t Go Back to School tells you how to learn what you need to learn in order to do what you need to do, without having to bend your life or your finances to fit into traditional schooling. This inspiring and practical guide provides concrete strategies and resources for getting started as an independent learner. Don’t Go Back to School is essential reading if you’re considering traditional higher education—and if you’re ready to become an independent learner. 
 Praise for Don't Go Back to School 
 "You don't need school for that! This is not a book about an easy path, but a book about a path that works. If you want to learn, go learn. But you don't need school for that." Seth Godin, author, Stop Stealing Dreams 
 "Don't Go Back to School makes good on the advice offered on the cover. It is a brisk, useful guide to learning what you need to learn without having to finish college, or go to grad school. Kio Stark has interviewed a roster of amazing, self-taught talents about how they did it, and distilled those observations into an essential guide." Clay Shirky, NYU Professor, author, Here Comes Everybody and Cognitive Surplus 
 “Not going to graduate school felt like a failure at the time, but wound up being the best choice I ever made. It set me out on a path of self-learning and discovery that led me to work I love, work that would've never flown in an academic setting. How I wish I'd had Kio's book as a guide to help me along the way!” —Austin Kleon, author, Steal Like an Artist

Don't Go Back to School: A Handbook for Learning Anything

Education & Teaching

Stark, Kio

Schools & Teaching

Kio Stark

Discover the unexpected pleasures and exciting possibilities of talking to people you don’t know—how these beautiful interruptions can change you, and the world we share. When Strangers Meet argues for the pleasures and transformative possibilities of talking to people you don’t know. Our lives are increasingly insular. We are in a hurry, our heads are down, minds elsewhere, we hear only the voices we already recognize and rarely take the effort to experience something or someone new. Talking to strangers pulls you into experiences of shared humanity and creates genuine emotional connections. It opens your world. Passing interactions cement your relationship to the places you live and work and play, they’re beautiful interruptions in the steady routines of our lives. In luminous prose, Stark shows how talking to strangers wakes you up. Threaded throughout are powerful vignettes from Stark’s own lifelong practice of talking to strangers and documenting brief encounters, along with a deep exploration of the dynamics of where, how, and why strangers come together. Ultimately, When Strangers Meet explores the rich emotional and political meanings that are conjured up in even the briefest conversations and unexpected connections with strangers. Stark renders visible the hidden processes by which we decide who to greet and trust in passing, and the unwritten rules by which these encounters operate. When Strangers Meet teaches readers how to start talking to strangers and includes adventurous challenges for those who dare.

When Strangers Meet: How People You Don't Know Can Transform You (TED Books)

Parenting & Relationships

Simon & Schuster/ TED

It begins with an envelope. Twenty years old, maybe more, with the dust of the dead-letter office still clinging to the stained, fraying paper. It arrives in the mailbox of Lucy with the address of a vacant neighborhood lot barely legible on the front. Inside she finds only a photograph of a man she does not recognize, but whose face captivates her instantly. She hunts for him, feeling for blind answers in the boroughs of her soul and city. The details of her world  of a neighborhood decaying and maimed in daylight, yet pulsing with some hidden life in dark; the shaded, shifting menace of shadow on the night sidewalk  blur together through the fogged lens of her favorite plastic camera, and the casual banter of summer afternoons evaporates into the hiss of something missing, leading Lucy across the darkened city, from the canal slicing through her neighborhood over the rivers at the city limits, its mystery resolving into vivid, caustic focus in the book’s concluding scenes. Follow Me Down owns moments both wondrous in their sympathy and wild in their desolation, as Stark culls from the crumbling city setting characters mercurial and impassable, joyous and redemptive.

Follow Me Down

Literature & Fiction

United States

Red Lemonade

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Books by Stark, Kio