Famous Homeschoolers

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[The Great Yazoo]

FAMOUS HOMESCHOOLERS

Constitutional Convention Delegates

Richard Basseti - Governor of Delaware

William Blount - U.S. Senator

George Clymer - U.S. Representative

William Few - U.S. Senator

Benjamin Franklin - Inventor and Statesman

William Houston - Lawyer

William S. Johnson - President of Columbia College

William Livingston - Governor of New Jersey

James Madison - 4th President of the U.S.

George Mason - Justice of Virginia County Court

John Francis Mercer - U.S. Representative

Charles Pickney III - Governor of S. Carolina

John Rutledge - Chief Justice U.S. Supreme Court

Richard D. Spaight - Governor of North Carolina

George Washington - 1st President of the U.S.

John Witherspoon - President of Princeton University

George Wythe - Justice of Virginia High Court

Presidents

John Adams

John Quincy Adams

Grover Cleveland

James Garfield

William Henry Harrison

Andrew Jackson

Thomas Jefferson

Abraham Lincoln

James Madison

Franklin Delano Roosevelt

Theodore Roosevelt

John Tyler

George Washington

Woodrow Wilson

Statesmen

Konrad Adenauer

Henry Fountain Ashurst

William Jennings Bryan

Winston Churchill

Henry Clay

Pierre du Pont

Benjamin Franklin

Alexander Hamilton

Patrick Henry

William Penn

Daniel Webster

Military Leaders

John Barry - Senior Navy Officer

Stonewall Jackson - Civil War General

John Paul Jones - Father of the American Navy

Robert E. Lee - Civil War General

Douglas MacArthur - U.S. General

George Patton - U.S. General

Matthew Perry - naval officer who opened up trade with Japan

John Pershing - U.S. General

David Dixon Porter - Civil War Admiral

U.S. Supreme Court Judges

John Jay

John Marshall

John Rutledge

Sandra Day O'Connor

Scientists

George Washington Carver

Pierre Curie

Albert Einstein

Michael Faraday - electrochemist

Oliver Heaviside - physicist and electromagnetism researcher

T.H. Huxley

Blaise Pascal

Booker T. Washington

Artists

William Blake

John Singleton Copley

Claude Monet

Grandma Moses

Charles Peale

Leonardo da Vinci

Andrew Wyeth

Jamie Wyeth

Religious Leaders

Joan of Arc

William Carey

Jonathan Edwards

Philipp Melancthon

Dwight L. Moody

John Newton

John Owen

Hudson Taylor

John & Charles Wesley

Brigham Young

Inventors

Alexander Graham Bell - invented the telephone

John Moses Browning - firearms inventor and designer

Peter Cooper - invented skyscraper, built first U.S. commercial locomotive

Thomas Edison - invented the stock ticker, mimeograph, phonograph, and perfected the electric light bulb

Benjamin Franklin - invented the lightning rod

Elias Howe - invented sewing machine

William Lear - airplane creator Cyrus McCormick - invented grain reaper

Guglielmo Marconi - developed radio

Eli Whitney - invented the cotton gin

Sir Frank Whittle - invented turbo jet engine

Orville and Wilbur Wright - built the first successful airplane

Composers

Irving Berlin

Anton Bruckner

Noel Coward

Felix Mendelssohn

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart

Francis Poulenc

John Philip Sousa

Writers

Hans Christian Anderson

Margaret Atwood

Pearl S. Buck

William F. Buckley, Jr.

Willa Cather

Agatha Christie

Samuel Clemens (Mark Twain)

Charles Dickens

Robert Frost - Pulitzer Prize-winning poet

Charlotte Perkins Gilman

Alex Haley

Brett Harte

L. Ron Hubbard

C.S. Lewis

Amy Lowell

Gabriela Mistral

Sean O'Casey

Christopher Paolini - author of #1 NY Times bestseller, Eragon

Isabel Paterson

Beatrix Potter - author of the beloved Peter Rabbit Tales

Carl Sandburg

George Bernard Shaw

Mattie J. T. Stepanek - 11-year-old author of Heartsongs

Mercy Warren

Phillis Wheatley

Walt Whitman

Laura Ingalls Wilder

Educators

Amos Bronson Alcott - innovative teacher, father of Louisa May Alcott Catharine Beecher - co-founder of the Hartford Female Seminary

Jill Ker Conway - first woman president of Smith College

Timothy Dwight - President of Yale University

William Samuel Johnson - President of Columbia College

Horace Mann - "Father of the American Common School"

Charlotte Mason - Founder of Charlotte Mason College of Education

Fred Terman - President of Stanford University

Frank Vandiver - President of Texas A&M University

Booker T. Washington - Founder of Tuskegee Institute

John Witherspoon - President of Princeton University

Performing Artists

Louis Armstrong - king of jazz

Charlie Chaplin - actor

Whoopi Goldberg - actress

Hanson - sibling singing group

Jennifer Love Hewitt - actress

Yehudi Menuhin - child prodigy violinist

Moffatts - Canadian version of Hanson

Frankie Muniz - child actor

LeAnne Rimes - teen-prodigy country music singer Business Entrepreneurs

Andrew Carnegie - wealthy steel industrialist

Amadeo Giannini - Bank of America’s founder

Horace Greeley - New York Tribune founder

Soichiro Honda - creator of the Honda automobile company

Peter Kindersley - book illustrator and publisher

Ray Kroc - founder of McDonald's fast food restaurant chain

Jimmy Lai - newspaper publisher; founder of Giordano International

Dr. Orison Swett Marden - founder, Success magazine

Adolph Ochs - New York Times founder

Joseph Pulitzer - newspaper publisher; established Pulitzer Prize

Colonel Harland Sanders - started Kentucky Fried Chicken

Dave Thomas - founder of the Wendy’s restaurant chain

Others

Abigail Adams - Wife of John Adams; mother of John Quincy Adams

Ansel Adams - Photographer

Susan B. Anthony - reformer and women’s rights leader

John James Audubon - ornithologist and artist Clara Barton - Started the Red Cross

Elizabeth Blackwell - first woman in the U.S. to receive a medical degree

John Burroughs - Naturalist

George Rogers Clark - Explorer

Davy Crockett - frontiersman

Eric Hoffer - social philosopher

Sam Houston - lawyer; first president of the Republic of Texas Charles Evans Hughes - jurist; Chief Justice

Mary D. Leakey - fossil hunter; wife of Richard Leakey

Tamara McKinney - World Cup Skier

Harriet Martineau - first woman sociologist

Margaret Mead - cultural anthropologist

John Stuart Mill - Free-market Economist

Charles Louis Montesquieu - Philosopher

John Muir - naturalist

Florence Nightingale - Nurse

Thomas Paine - political writer during the American Revolution

Bill Ridell - Newspaperman

Will Rogers - Humorist

Bertrand Russell - Logician Jim Ryan - World Runner

Albert Schweitzer - Physician

Sir Ernest Shackleton - Explorer

Herbert Spencer - philosopher, sociologist Gloria Steinem - founder and long-time editor of Ms. magazine

Jason Taylor - plays in the National Football League

Mary Walker - Civil War physician; recipient of the Congressional Medal of Honor

Lester Frank Ward - "Father of American Sociology"

Martha Washington - wife of George Washington

Frances E. C. Willard - educator, temperance leader, and suffragist

Frank Lloyd Wright - Architect

Elijah ben Solomon Zalman - Jewish scholar

[The Great Yazoo]

Sorry about:

Whoopi Goldberg - actress

Hanson - sibling singing group

[twigs]

Are you sure about C. S. Lewis? His mother died when he was young and he went to school--he wrote about it. He hated it!

[Brilliant]

Saw John Travolta tell Dave Letterman last night that his kids are homeschooled. Seems kinda ironic given that he's a big Dem.

[Borges]

He's also a big Scientologist so maybe he doesn't want the public schools infecting his kids with anti-Hubbardian brainwashing? :-)

[Josh in PA]

I don't think I would label Travolta a Big Dem..

He's a very quiet Dem at best. And I wouldn't be suprised if he was a closet conservative.

[The Great Yazoo]

His mother died when he was young and he went to school--he wrote about it. He hated it!

You are right, but he may have been educated at home during some period of his life.

All four of my children think of themselves as being homeschooled. But all of them have attended some school during their lives (through 5th grade, through 1st grade, pre-K, pre-K). None of them has habitually boarded the Yellow Bus, however.

[kellynla]

interesting...
thanks for posting

[JCRoberts]

Ummmmm....what's the point? Can we safely assume that most everyone else who has achieved some form of greatness went through public or private school? Is this list supposed to somehow show that home-schooling is superior or just as adequate? Forgive me, but I really don't see the point of this being posted in "news/activism." But then again, I went to public school so my critical thinking skills are probably deficient.

[Guillermo]

I wasn't aware that Barbarino was a "big Dem."

[Brilliant]

Remember hims standing on the platform with Clinton?

[1stFreedom]

...not everybody who homeschools does it to form intelligent individuals who have a well rounded education, including the ability to employ critical thinking. Some do it to indoctrinate knee jerk reactionary ideologies into thier kids, in an effort to pass down their superior ignorance to their offspring.

[Brilliant]

Nah. He was at the Dem conventions when Clinton was nominated.

[The Great Yazoo]

I went to public school so my critical thinking skills are probably deficient.

I, too, went to public school so I didn't know how to post this elsewhere. Many apologies!

[Brilliant]

Yeah, but I'm betting the real reason Travolta does it is for security. Can't say I would blame him for that.

The way it came up was that he mentioned he'd taken his daughter for a midnight hang glide, and Dave asked "don't your kids have to go to school?" He said "we homeschool. We make our own hours."

[The Great Yazoo]

Some do it to indoctrinate knee jerk reactionary ideologies into thier kids, in an effort to pass down their superior ignorance to their offspring.

At least most learn it's impolite to insult those of whom one is ignorant.

[Rytwyng]

....Some do it to indoctrinate knee jerk reactionary ideologies into thier kids, in an effort to pass down their superior ignorance to their offspring.

No, that's what the PUBLIC school system does nowadays.

[NotJustAnotherPrettyFace]

I don't think I would label Travolta a Big Dem..He's a very quiet Dem at best. And I wouldn't be suprised if he was a closet conservative.

He's a very big "Church" of Scientology member - THAT'S what he is. Weird at the very least.

[Guillermo]

No...was Horshack there too?

[politicket]

...not everybody who homeschools does it to form intelligent individuals who have a well rounded education, including the ability to employ critical thinking. Some do it to indoctrinate knee jerk reactionary ideologies into thier kids, in an effort to pass down their superior ignorance to their offspring.

We're all "indoctrinated" at some point in our life, so it makes sense that those getting it from their parents are the most stable and have higher degrees of success.

[paltz]

Saw John Travolta tell Dave Letterman last night that his kids are homeschooled. Seems kinda ironic given that he's a big Dem.

nahhh it's always like that with the Dems...against guns, but they have armed bodyguards against vouchers, but send their kids to fancy private schools, against SUV's, but fly on fancy private jets. This is all par for the course.