Youth Can and Do!

Here is an excerpt from an article in Life Learning Magazine, Jan/Feb 2005 issue. The article,"Nurturing Everyday Genius" is written by John Taylor Gatto.

Still an older way of coming to maturity, of taking an education for oneself,managed to survive and perpetuate itself without fanfare. In 1989 a school dropout from Brooklyn, a teenage girl named Tania Aebi, with no nautical experience than I have, sailed around the world alone-first women know to do so in history.
A few years ago, an elementary school dropout--George Meeghan,took the longest walk in human history, entirely on his own hook, un-sponsored, to prove to himself he could do it.--the man who gave us popcorn in movie theaters,an idea which made him a billionaire, was selling flags on the street at the age of nine.. and filling vending machines at 12. Lew Wasserman, recently deceased head of the largest entertainment conglomerate on earth, cut school to be a movie usher at age 12;by age 18 he had figured out how to sign a string of movie stars like Fred Astaire to his contracts. Michelle Wie, Hawaiian golfing sensation, multimillionaire by age 14 reached the enviable pinnacle because her father and mother understood what really mattered;the tennis playing Williams sisters, daughters fo a black mailman who couldn't afford tennis lessons, were worth 1000 million each at age 21 because their non-tennis playing parents taught them the game from books and videos when they were five. The head of the most prestigious scientific project on the earth (Francis S. Collins),the human genome project was homeschooled on a remote sheep ranch in Virginia by his mother using this intriguing methodology:he studied whatever interested him for exactly as long as it held his interest!
Gatto goes on to ask,"Shouldn't every body passed through a forced schooling meat grinder be made intensely ware of these models of the possible, and many more bedsides?..And if a college degree is wanted, shouldn't kids understand that hundreds of first class universities will allow candidates to earn one inexpensively through correspondence-same degree as sit-down students get, except much, much,cheaper and much more convenient?"