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Charles D. Hayes is a lifelong learning
advocate, a self-taught philosopher, and an author and publisher. At age 17, he dropped out of high school to join the U.S.
Marines Corps. After four years of duty he became a police officer for the Dallas Police Department. Later
he moved to Alaska, where he has worked for more than 20 years in the oil industry. In 1987 Hayes founded Autodidactic Press,
committed to lifelong learning as the lifeblood of democracy and the key to living life to its fullest.
Charles D. Hayes is the author of Self University: The Price of Tuition
Is the Desire to Learn : Your Degree Is a Better Life; Training Yourself : The 21st Century CredentialThe Rapture Of Maturity: A Legacy Of Lifelong Learning; Proving You're Qualified:
Strategies for Competent People Without College Degrees; Beyond the American Dream: Lifelong Learning and the Search for Meaning
in a Postmodern World; and, Portals in a Northern Sky.
According to the book description of
Self University: The Price of Tuition Is the Desire to Learn : Your Degree Is a Better Life, “From
the search for meaning to creating your own credentials, Self-University is a liberating, life-centering experience.”
According to the book description of Beyond the American Dream: Lifelong
Learning and the Search for Meaning in a Postmodern World, “The final decade of the Second Millennium
has issued a flourish of books foretelling the end of everything from science to history. In the first decade of the Third
Millennium, books about new beginnings will take their place. Is it a time for despair or hope? Many of today's social
critics deplore the effects of multiculturalism in spawning a postmodernism era. One observer, however, finds reason to celebrate,
claiming it's about time we looked beyond the confines of our king-of-the-mountain value system, to a broader plane of
understanding. In his newest book, Charles D. Hayes submits
that the American Dream we've learned to champion is an insufficient aspiration for human beings. Cultural expectations
create social reality. "If having must come at the expense of being," he asserts, "then you and I are missing
the best part of life and our culture is the worse for it."
Reaching the top--at any cost, by the current model--has outlived its usefulness
as a go! al in human society. Those who make it, remain unfulfilled. Those who don't, become marginalized and resentful.
Through the power of our intellect, says Hayes, we can begin living off the interest of our biological world instead of continuing
to eat away at the principle. Either we improve society through our ideas, or we perpetuate its deterioration through a lack
of them.
A sophomoric sense of citizenship might reason this way: "Since I wasn't
alive during slavery, I bear no responsibility for it." Certainly, it is senseless to blame ourselves for what happened
before we were born, but Hayes maintains we do have a responsibility toward what is. If you and I are the beneficiaries of
an unjust system stemming from the biases, prejudices, and atrocities of the past, then we have an obligation to remedy the
unfairness. Beyond the American Dream points the way to rising above the lock-step patterns of our culture and assuming our
rightful roles as thoughtful, responsible citizens.
In failing to truly value to individual thought and reflection, our society guarantees
that an ever-increasing number of citizens will practice neither. As in his previous works, Hayes urges readers to take control
of their own learning and to adopt self-directed inquiry as a lifelong priority. Education should be regarded "not as
something you get," he says, "but as something you take. Self-education is the lifeblood of democracy, the key to
controlling your life, and a means to living your life to its fullest."
Beyond the American Dream illustrates these ideas in practice. Offering fresh
insight on the wisdom of great thinkers from Aristotle to Alan Watts, together with a tantalizing juxtaposition of ideas that
can't help but foster reflection, Hayes demonstrates how the sensual pleasures of learning can be inherently more satisfying
than anything posing as entertainment. He gives compelling evidence that America's greatest treasures are found, "not
in our shopping malls, but in our libraries."
Certain that the greatest means we
have of persuading others is to live by the example we advocate, Charles Hayes challenges each of us to re-evaluate our values
and to amend our ambitions accordingly. Beyond the American Dream is a thoughtful summons to awaken from the New Age doctrines
that have so engulfed our culture. It is a book about the meaning of meaning and implores us to find purpose and meaning in
life by leaving the world a better place than we found it.”
According to the book description of
Proving You're Qualified: Strategies for Competent People Without College Degrees, “Proving
You're Qualified is a career book for competent people who have learned their jobs, on the job. More than 75 percent of
the workers in America are without college degrees. Many are highly skilled and capable, yet they are often passed over for
promotion for lack of a degree, which has nothing, whatsoever, to do with their performance. This book offers a frank discussion
of educational merit and actual performance in a workplace caught in the grip of frightening change. Proving You're Qualified
enables the reader to better understand the nature of power in hierarchies, to gain insight into methods for fighting credentialism,
and to save time and money by utilizing alternate methods of adult continuing education.”
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