"I always tell my students there's an inverse correlation between the grade they get in my class and how well they're likely to do when they graduate. In a lot of structured environments, you grade along a dimension. I don't necessarily measure creativity. I don't measure attitudinal characteristics about certain kinds of things. I think you have to set standards for yourself that are very personal, not standards that other people dictate."
-William Sahlman, professor at Harvard Business School

On the road, we discovered that most people we met had not built their lives around what they studied in school. Ben Younger, a filmmaker in NYC, was a political science major. Pat O'Donnell, CEO of Aspen Skiing Company, studied engineering. Michael Dell was pre-med.

The idea that we have to choose a major in college and then use that major to define our lives isn't accurate anymore. While academia is a valuable part of your life that teaches you how to think and look at the world, the boxes it puts you in can isolate you from discovering your life's work.

We ran into Sir Ken Robinson at the Getty Museum in Los Angeles, where he works as a senior advisor on educational policy. It turned out that Sir Ken was a former professor at Warwick University in England, which gave him a unique perspective on how academia can shape how people look at our lives:

"The whole education system has a hierarchy of subjects built into it that is very skewed and partial. At the top is languages and mathematics, then the humanities, and at the bottom are the arts. Doing art is not thought to be as worthwhile as doing mathematics and sciences. At fourteen or fifteen years of age this hierarchy starts to kick in, and it overrides the real talents that most people have. It's why a lot of prominent artists, musicians, and dancers didn't do well in school-because what they could do well wasn't valued. They felt alienated. One of the consequences of this model is that most people go through education never discovering what they're good at, because schools aren't looking for what you're good at. They're looking for skills that they can sell off. People think that education is about following the natural grain of your ability. But it really isn't about that. Education is intended to be a system of social engineering. It was designed, for the most part, in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries to be a compulsory system that everyone was required to go through. And the reason it came into being was the industrial revolution. If you look at the industrial economy, it was 80 percent manual work and 20 percent professional work. But the world now is so unlike the world during the industrial revolution. There is an economic and cultural revolution happening and the education system hasn't kept pace with it. Our education system is still based on conformity. The industrial model runs right through it. But because of this new revolution, we can better expose what we're capable of. And by doing that, we can literally create our own realities."

Sir Ken helped us to understand the frustrations we were feeling with academia before we hit the road. It didn't mean that we should sit back and blame our universities for our confusion, but it did mean that we needed to hit the road to broaden our educational experiences and not rely solely on what we learned in the classroom.

Prior to hitting the road, we were planning on defining our lives based on this academic perspective. But on the road, we found reasons not to. We encountered stories from people like Michael Dell, Ben Younger, and Pat O'Donnell, whose lives didn't follow that template. And we were exposed to viewpoints from people like Sir Ken and Dr. Sahlman, who questioned the current academic model. For the first time in our lives, we started to think for ourselves and define our roads based on what mattered most to us as individuals, rather than a box we lived in during school.

The Associated Press

NASHVILLE, Tenn. -- Several concerts on the Dixie Chicks' "Accidents & Accusations" tour have been canceled after slow ticket sales, but the group says it has replaced them with other dates.

Kansas City, Houston, St. Louis, Memphis and Knoxville are among 14 cities no longer on the original schedule released in May, according to a revised itinerary posted Thursday on the Dixie Chick's Web site.

Other shows, including Nashville, Los Angeles, Denver and Phoenix, have been pushed back to later dates.

The North American leg of the tour kicked off July 21 in Detroit. Billboard magazine and other trade publications have reported lackluster sales in some markets, particularly in the South and Midwest.

Group spokeswoman Kathy Allmand said Monday that the total number of North American dates remains the same, with several Canadian cities added in place of the U.S. shows.

The trio released a statement last week attributing the changes to attempts to "accommodate demand" and said more dates might be added next year.

The group also said the adjustments will allow them to promote the documentary "Dixie Chicks: Shut up and Sing," for the Toronto International Film Festival in September.

"We hope that our fans who were looking forward to a stop that is no longer on the tour will be able to join us at a nearby arena this fall, and we are sorry for any confusion or inconvenience these changes have caused," the Dixie Chicks said.

Many country fans criticized the band after lead singer Natalie Maines told a London audience in 2003 on the eve of war in Iraq that the trio was "ashamed" President Bush was from their home state of Texas.

County radio stations dropped them from their playlists and have been slow to welcome them back, despite strong sales of their latest album, "Taking the Long Way."