The good folks at Home Education Magazine—Mary Nix in particular—helped get 25 complete issues of Growing Without Schooling (GWS) uploaded online. The issues were reformatted from text files we stored on floppy disks over the years, with all the ads, directories, and other dated information excluded. I'm currently exploring ways to get the entire archive of 143 GWS issues online exactly as the originals appeared, and am enjoying the process. So I've been re-reading issues from my complete set of GWS and am struck by the timelessness of much of the information, as well as many other things I will comment on in coming posts. However, this little extract from GWS 14 should give heart to many who feel their children won't be prepared for adult work if they don't follow standard school procedures.

CELEBRITY UNSCHOOLERS

From THE BOOK OF LISTS (by Wallechinsky, Wallace, & Wallace):

15 FAMOUS PEOPLE WHO NEVER GRADUATED FROM GRADE SCHOOL: Andrew Carnegie, Charlie Chaplin, Buffalo Bill Cody, Noel Coward, Charles Dickens, Isadora Duncan, Thomas Edison, Samuel Gompers, Maksim Gorky, Claude Monet, Sean O’Casey, Alfred E. Smith, John Philip Sousa, Henry M. Stanley, Mark Twain.

20 FAMOUS HIGH-SCHOOL OR SECONDARY-SCHOOL DROPOUTS: Harry Belafonte, Cher, Mary Baker Eddy, Henry Ford, George Gershwin, D. W. Griffith, Adolf Hitler, Jack London, Dean Martin, Bill Mauldin, Rod McKuen, Steve McQueen, Amedeo Modigliani, Al Pacino, Will Rogers, William Saroyan, Frank Sinatra, Marshal Tito, Orville Wright, Wilbur Wright.

20 FAMOUS PEOPLE WHO NEVER ATTENDED COLLEGE: Joseph Chamberlain, Grover Cleveland, Joseph Conrad, Aaron Copland, Hart Crane, Eugene Debs, Amelia Earhart, Paul Gauguin, Kahlil Gibran, Ernest Hemingway, Rudyard Kipling, Abraham Lincoln, H. L. Mencken, John D. Rockefeller, Eleanor Roosevelt, George Bernard Shaw, Dylan Thomas, Harry S. Truman, George Washington, Virginia Woolf.

13 FAMOUS AMERICAN LAWYERS WHO NEVER WENT TO LAW SCHOOL: Patrick Henry, John Jay*, John Marshall*, William Wirt, Roger B. Taney*, Daniel Webster, Salmon P. Chase*, Abraham Lincoln, Stephen Douglas, Clarence Darrow (attended one year), Robert Storey, J. Strom Thurmond, James 0. Eastland. (* - Chief Justice of the US Supreme Court.)