Posted on 04/28/2009 3:10:10 PM PDT by Sopater
1. Agatha Christie. Agatha was a painfully shy girl, so her mom homeschooled her even though her two older siblings attended private school.
2. Pearl S. Buck was born in West Virginia, but her family moved to China when she was just three months old. She was homeschooled by a Confucian scholar and learned English as a second language from her mom.
3. Alexander Graham Bell was homeschooled by his mother until he was about 10. It was at this point that she started to go deaf and didn’t feel she could properly educate him any more. Her deafness inspired Bell to study acoustics and sound later in life.
4. If Thomas Edison was around today, he would probably be diagnosed with ADD – he left public school after only three months because his mind wouldn’t stop wandering. His mom homeschooled him after that, and he credited her with the success of his education: “My mother was the making of me. She was so true, so sure of me; and I felt I had something to live for, someone I must not disappoint.”
5. Ansel Adams was homeschooled at the age of 12 after his “wild laughter and undisguised contempt for the inept ramblings of his teachers” disrupted the classroom. His father took on his education from that point forward.
6. Robert Frost hated school so much he would get physically ill at the thought of going. He was homeschooled until his high school years.
7. Woodrow Wilson studied under his dad, one of the founders of the Southern Presbyterian Church in the United States (PCUS). He didn’t learn to read until he was about 12. He took a few classes at a school in Augusta, Georgia, to supplement his father’s teachings, and ended up spending a year at Davidson College before transferring to Princeton.
8. Mozart was educated by his dad as the Mozart family toured Europe from 1763-1766.
9. Laura Ingalls Wilder was homeschooled until her parents finally settled in De Smet in what was then Dakota Territory. She started teaching school herself when she was only 15 years old.
10. Louisa May Alcott studied mostly with her dad, but had a few lessons from family friends Henry David Thoreau, Ralph Waldo Emerson and Nathaniel Hawthorne. Can you imagine?
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.
“People ask me, ‘If your son isn’t in school, what about socialization?’ I tell them, ‘That’s easy. Every morning, I take him in the bathroom, beat him up, and take his lunch money.’”
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.
Cute post. Mother’s have a tremendous impact on family and society. It is no wonder that Jesus came and sanctified our Blessed Mother and the New Eve.
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.
Have you read the book "Do Hard Things"?
LOL! Great retort.
We are very relaxed homeschoolers and I have worried every time one of my kids has started taking college courses. They have managed to rise to the occasion and do very well. We are down to the last one of four, finishing ninth grade!
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.
For that matter, Washington was schooled at home, as were many if not most of our early presidents.
But in the absence of a public school system the distinction isn’t perhaps all that relevant.
No.....never heard of it. Should I?
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