Edison and Einstein

We're visiting grandparents this week, so posting will be a bit light. I'm just going to throw up some quotes today.

Thomas Edison, inventor of moving pictures, the phonograph, the stock ticker, microphones, and incandescent lightbulbs, was homeschooled. As one author explains:

In 1854, Reverend G. B. Engle belittled one of his students, seven-year-old Thomas Alva Edison, as "addled." This out-raged the youngster, and he stormed out of the Port Huron, Michigan school, the first formal school he had ever attended. His mother, Nancy Edison, brought him back the next day to discuss the situation with Reverend Engle, but she became angry at his rigid ways. Everything was forced on the kids. She withdrew her son from the school where he had been for only three months and resolved to educate him at home.

I hadn't realized that Edison was also a prolific reader, and for instance, got so enthused over Les Miserables that friends took to calling him "Victor Hugo Edison". You can read more about Edison's "unschooling" education at the above link.

Edison's aide and co-worker, Martin Andre Rosanoff, said at Edison's funeral:

Had Edison been formally schooled, he might not have had the audacity to create such impossible things.

As for Einstein, I'll just include some of his words below and leave it at that.

One had to cram all this stuff into one's mind for the examinations, whether one liked it or not. This coercion had such a deterring effect on me that, after I had passed the final examination, I found the consideration of any scientific problems distasteful to me for an entire year.

Imagination is more important than knowledge.

Education is what remains after one has forgotten everything he learned in school.

I believe in standardizing automobiles, not human beings.

It is, in fact, nothing short of a miracle that the modern methods of instruction have not yet entirely strangled the holy curiosity of inquiry; for this delicate little plant, aside from stimulation, stands mainly in need of freedom; without this it goes to wrack and ruin without fail. It is a grave mistake to think that the enjoyment of seeing and searching can be promoted by means of coercion and a sense of duty.