don’t forget Theodore Roosevelt, who was tutored by his aunt (and others...but not at government school).
(But what about socialization??)
Tim Tebow, one of the finest college football players ever was home schooled.
John Adams
John Quincy Adams
This list ought to be revised. Some of these people are not good examples. Woodrow Wilson—the first Fascist dictator of the 20th Century. TR—another Fascist, though not quite as bad as Wilson.
Seems like I read that Clara Barton was home-schooled. She spent two years of her life, beginning at age 11, nursing her brother after he fell while building a barn. She was also sent to a boarding school, but was so painfully shy and homesick that she had to return home to finish her education.
Bump.
Most members of Mensa have some kind of education horror story to tell, which might be the reason that homeschooling is popular in the group.
Mensa is a high-IQ society. Membership is based on scoring at the 98th percentile or above on any of dozens of approved, standardized tests if general intelligence. Generally, Mensans can complete high school with good to excellent grades without ever being challenged or forced to study. Their natural curiosity is usually enough to carry them through the 12th grade, but they often hit a wall when they enter college.
That happened to me at MIT, and to several of my friends at various other colleges. But my parents were fervent believers in public education, and would NEVER let me skip any grades or attend a private school, although from the 7th grade on they certainly could afford it. I finally got my first degree decades later.
He had an abnormally large but well-shaped head, and it is said that the local doctors feared he might have brain trouble. In fact, on account of his assumed delicacy, he was not allowed to go to school for some years, and even when he did attend for a short time the results were not encouraging -- his mother being hotly indignant upon hearing that the teacher had spoken of him to an inspector as "addled." The youth was, indeed, fortunate far beyond the ordinary in having a mother at once loving, well-informed, and ambitious, capable herself, from her experience as a teacher, of undertaking and giving him an education better than could be secured in the local schools of the day. p. 16
It was at the Port Huron public school that Edison received all the regular scholastic instruction he ever enjoyed -- just three months. He might have spent the full term there, but, as already noted, his teacher had found him ``addled.'' He was always, according to his own recollection, at the foot of the class, and had come almost to regard himself as a dunce, while his father entertained vague anxieties as to his stupidity. The truth of the matter seems to be that Mrs. Edison, a teacher of uncommon ability and force, held no very high opinion of the average public-school methods and results, and was both eager to undertake the instruction of her son and ambitious for the future of a boy whom she knew from pedagogic experience to be receptive and thoughtful to a very unusual degree. With her he found study easy and pleasant. The quality of culture in that simple but refined home, as well as the intellectual character of this youth without schooling, may be inferred from the fact that before he had reached the age of twelve he had read, with his mother's help, Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Hume's History of England, Sears' History of the World, Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy, and the Dictionary of Sciences; and had even attempted to struggle through Newton's Principia, whose mathematics were decidedly beyond both teacher and student. p. 25-26
--Edison, His Life and Inventions, vol. 1.
Dyer, Frank Lewis and Thomas Commerford Martin
bump
Homeschooled might not be the right term. Self-schooled might be better. But Lincoln fits in there somewhere.