Self-educated People Who've Made a Difference
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Self-educated People Who've Made a Difference
1–10 of 35 posts
Re: Self-educated People Who've Made a Difference
#2Excellent list, I was wondering if someone bothered to make it.
Re: Self-educated People Who've Made a Difference
#3And the master himself says :
Terry Pratchett: "I didn't go to university. Didn't even finish A-levels. But I have sympathy for those who did"
Re: Self-educated People Who've Made a Difference
#4A lot of the people on that list at least went to college. It was a lot easier to get away with this back then, whereas today no one will even look at you unless you have a diploma of some kind (in most fields, at least). I am far more impressed with the ones who never even started, or who never even finished the equivalent of high school.
A good number of people on the list are entrepreneurs, too. Even today, you can get away with having far less formal education if you strike out on your own.
Re: Self-educated People Who've Made a Difference
#5For bonus points, extract the names, get the years when they lived, and plot them with simile timeplot or something similar. It seems to me that a lot of them were born in the 1800's, but maybe I'm wrong.
Re: Self-educated People Who've Made a Difference
#6The issue is not the instruction you get at an university, but the environment. If obesity is contagious, education is so much more so.
Re: Self-educated People Who've Made a Difference
#7NOTE: Most of the people in the list are before 1900. So that is old school :)
Re: Self-educated People Who've Made a Difference
#8For bonus points, extract the names, get the years when they lived, and plot them with simile timeplot or something similar. It seems to me that a lot of them were born in the 1800's, but maybe I'm wrong.
1600 - 1699: 2
1700 - 1799: 18
1800 - 1899: 79
1900 - 1999: 58
Still, given the population explosion, it's unlikely that there were fewer autodidacts in the 20th century than in the 19th.
Raw data: http://pastie.org/783067
Re: Self-educated People Who've Made a Difference
#9The issue is not the instruction you get at an university, but the environment. If obesity is contagious, education is so much more so.
For those who need to be infected that may be true sometimes. But to go to university you have to endure 12 or 13 years of school where everything imaginable is done to stifle any interest you may have had before.
Re: Self-educated People Who've Made a Difference
#10It seems like a number of people on that list are authors and artists. Those are fields where university education has never really been of any significance. It would be more interesting to see a list with those and similar professions removed.
Secondly a couple of them are very dubious,for example Chuck Yeager didn't attend college, but calling him self educated is a bit of a stretch as it ignores all the training and education he got in the military.