I saw a great cartoon today on xkcd.
Replace Perl with PHP, and that is how I feel about my public education. Granted, there were several teachers that had a large impact on my professional life, but over all my self-education has had a much bigger impact than my overall public education.
Also, if you’re a technical guy, and you’ve never read xkcd, you must read it. It is a fantastic cartoon series, especially for those with a little geek in them.
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Education is valuable, but we do it ALL WRONG here in the U.S. There is definitely not enough emphasis on things that will actually produce success as an adult.
There is a guy who lives in the next town over from me, who was an orphan in Africa and was brought to the United States as a young man. He spoke no English. Within two years, not only had he learned English, but he had gone through 12 years of primary education! That’s right, he learned all the requisite knowledge of first grade through senior year of high school — twelve years of schooling for most of us — in just two years… AND learned to speak, read, and write English at the same time.
Now he works as a pharmacy technician and will probably be a doctor someday.
Is he a genius? He may be a bit smarter than the average person, but I doubt he’s an Albert Einstein. In the US we are taught that mediocrity is “average”, when in truth, nearly every young person has the capacity to get A’s and high B’s. Our whole system is designed to create a large, lower-middle socio-economic class.