How David Blake founded Degreed and BookClub: And reformed education in the process.

• Author: Blake, David
• Position: FOUNDER SERIES

I GREW UP IN UTAH. In high school, I was a 4.0 student and racked up over 12 Advanced Placement courses. I loved to compete to be at the top of my class.

However, I had a bit of an epiphany when I sat to take the ACT at American Fork High School one Saturday morning. You know how it is--it's 8:30 in the morning, and you're there for three hours in a gymnasium with the desks spread out so that you can't cheat. As I sat in those rows of desks, I remember thinking, "I can't believe this is how people get sorted in and out of their futures." It just seemed so ridiculous.

None of our normal classes focused on preparing us for this test. I knew the importance of this test, and I had studied for it, but I know many people who didn't. I couldn't believe that this was the system we were using to decide who got to go to what college and who got scholarships there. Additionally, at the time, a lot of colleges used your ACT score as an admissions factor. How was it that half of the equation for your college experience was decided by a three-hour test taken when you were only 17 years old?

It just seemed wrong.

It wasn't about my score. I did well on the ACT, but it still bothered me. I visited my high school guidance counselor for the first time ever and asked for the history of the ACT. No one in the counseling office had an answer for me--they knew why the test was important now, but they had no idea how it had come to be.

This betrays me as an elder millennial, but without Google, I did the next best thing and went to the library. I wanted to find a book on the ACT or the SAT--not how to prep for them, but why they existed. There wasn't a book on that topic, but there were books on the general history of education.

I started reading those, and then I had another epiphany--I realized that those books were the first thing I had ever truly studied that weren't assigned to me by a teacher. I had managed to become a great student, but I realized that I was truly a terrible learner!

REFORMING EDUCATION

It took me a minute to understand the difference between being a student and a learner, but pulling those two things apart was like this revelation for me. Once I saw it that way, I appreciated that I was a product of an educational system that had turned me into this temporary sponge that would soak up information and spit it out for a test.

Being a great student was about checking the boxes and jumping through hoops. Learning wasn't the actual goal of the system.

I was genuinely a very bad learner at that point, but I was committed to changing that, so I made this promise to myself that I was going to reform my own education. Of course, I needed something to really learn about. I had already kind of started learning about education, so I kept after that, and my curiosity blossomed into a passion.

My passion then bloomed into a bit of an obsession, snowballing until I spent the summer after high school writing a business plan on what the "university of the future" should look like.

I was finally becoming a better learner.

AND FINDING FELLOW REFORMERS

I went to BYU and tried to study...