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Inspiration And Pespiration
By peace | January 8, 2008
Inspiration and Perspiration
The long list of school “problems” includes men and women who grew up to be distinguished adults. Among them are the authors Thomas Mann, Pearl Buck and Willa Cather; the inventor Henry Ford; the dancer Isadora Duncan; the scientist Albert Einstein; the composer Edvard Grieg. Disastrous school experiences of creative people are almost commonplace.
At the same time that author William Saroyan was a terrible school problem, he read every book in the Fresno, California, public library. Sigrid Undset, another well-known author, could not stand the school’s freedom-crubing discipline… Among school dropouts are the Wright Brothers, Thomas Edison, Pablo Picasso, Dimitri Shostakovich, Marchese Guglielmo Marconi, Noel Coward, Mark Twain and Pablo Casals.
Those who stayed in school had similar difficulties. Einstein, who was slow of speech, wanted to learn in his own way. He believed examinations, with their insistence on memorized facts, impeded education, which he felt was based on a “perpetual sense of wonder”. It is said that he had a terrible time passing the usual school examinations, as did the composer Giacomo Puccini and the scientist Paul Ehrlich.
Writers who couldn’t make the grade in class but who took literary honours afterward include Proust (his teachers said his compositions were disorganized), Stephen Crane, Eugene O’Neil, William Faulkner and F. Scott Fitzgerals.
Giftedness is a mixture of heredity and environment, and it’s not absolutely clear how much of each ingredient goes into the recipe. You can do everything ‘right’ and still not have a gifted child. You can do a lot of wrong and have a gifted child.
By Dorothy Rich
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