15 Famous Writers on the Perils of a Formal Education

Students all over the country are beginning to head back to school, and some, I imagine, aren’t too happy about it. If that’s you, you’re in good company: lots of famous writers hated school, too. Writers are usually assumed to be highly-educated types, and many are, of course. But they’re not always educated in the way you might think—some of the English language’s most famous authors were less-than-great in the classroom, but had the creative skills (and perhaps some out-of-the-box ways of thinking) to make up for it. So, to ease the pain—or temper the joy, if you’re one of those—of starting school, I tracked down what a few great writers had to say on their own experiences with formal education (or lack thereof), and in some cases, on the dangers of relying too much on the classroom to figure out how to live in the world. The overwhelming message I get from the below is this: school is all very well and good, but it’s not going to teach you what you really need to know, because actually, only you can figure out what that is. Probably, though, you’ll get there faster if you spend some time in the library. Take it from Ray Bradbury, to start with:

“Libraries raised me. I don’t believe in colleges and universities. I believe in libraries because most students don’t have any money. When I graduated from high school, it was during the Depression and we had no money. I couldn’t go to college, so I went to the library three days a week for 10 years.”  –Ray Bradbuy, to The New York Times.

“You can’t learn to write in college. It’s a very bad place for writers because the teachers always think they know more than you do—and they don’t. They have prejudices. They may like Henry James, but what if you don’t want to write like Henry James? They may like John Irving, for instance, who’s the bore of all time. A lot of the people whose work they’ve taught in the schools for the last thirty years, I can’t understand why people read them and why they are taught. The library, on the other hand, has no biases. The information is all there for you to interpret. You don’t have someone telling you what to think. You discover it for yourself.”  –Ray Bradbury, in an interview with Sam Weller

*

“I received the fundamentals of my education in school, but that was not enough. My real education, the superstructure, the details, the true architecture, I got out of the public library. For an impoverished child whose family could not afford to buy books, the library was the open door to wonder and achievement, and I can never be sufficiently grateful that I had the wit to charge through that door and make the most of it.

Now, when I read constantly about the way in which library funds are being cut and cut, I can only think that the door is closing and that American society has found one more way to destroy itself.”  –Isaac Asimov in I, Asimov

*

“[My mother] said that I must always be intolerant of ignorance but understanding of illiteracy. That some people, unable to go to school, were more educated and even more intelligent than college professors. She encouraged me to listen carefully to what country people called mother wit. That in those homely sayings was couched the collective wisdom of generations.”  –Maya Angelou in I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings

*

“You must never let schooling interfere with education.”  –often attributed to Mark Twain, but actually written first by Grant Allen.

*

“But how many pretentious little kids have we been able to develop through progressive education! We can turn out a hell of a lot of these. I once taught at Bard College, where the students were highly articulate, some of them highly imaginative and creative. But many were utterly unprepared by their education to live in this world without extensive aid. What I’m trying to say is that it is not that we are all estranged from our backgrounds and given skills that don’t apply to the real world, but that something basically wrong is happening to our educational system. We are missing the target, and all of our children are suffering as a result. To be ill-clothed, ill-housed and ill-fed is not the only way to suffer deprivation.

. . .

I don’t know what intelligence is. But this I do know, both from life and from literature: whenever you reduce human life to two plus two equals four, the human element within the human animal says, “I don’t give a damn.” You can work on that basis, but the kids cannot. If you can show me how I can cling to that which is real to me, while teaching me a way into the larger society, then I will not only drop my defenses and my hostility, but I will sing your praises and help you to make the desert bear fruit.”  –Ralph Ellison, in a 1963 lecture, the entirety of which is really worth a read

*

“Education is an admirable thing. But it is well to remember from time to time that nothing that is worth knowing can be taught.”  –Oscar Wilde, in A Few Maxims for the Instruction of the Over-Educated, first published anonymously in 1894

*

“I’ve often thought there ought to be a manual to hand to little kids, telling them what kind of planet they’re on, why they don’t fall off it, how much time they’ve probably got here, how to avoid poison ivy, and so on. I tried to write one once. It was called Welcome to Earth. But I got stuck on explaining why we don’t fall off the planet. Gravity is just a word. It doesn’t explain anything. If I could get past gravity, I’d tell them how we reproduce, how long we’ve been here, apparently, and a little bit about evolution. And one thing I would really like to tell them about is cultural relativity. I didn’t learn until I was in college about all the other cultures, and I should have learned that in the first grade. A first grader should understand that his or her culture isn’t a rational invention; that there are thousands of other cultures and they all work pretty well; that all cultures function on faith rather than truth; that there are lots of alternatives to our own society. I didn’t find that our for sure until I was in the graduate school of the University of Chicago. It was terribly exciting.”  –Kurt Vonnegut, in a 1963 interview with Playboy

*

“Thank goodness, my education was neglected; I was never sent to school . . . it would have rubbed off some of the originality (if I had not died of shyness or been killed with over pressure).”  –Beatrix Potter, in a 1929 letter to a friend

*

“I despised school—or schools, for I was always changing from one to another—and year after year failed the simplest subjects out of loathing and boredom. I played hooky at least twice a week and was always running away from home. Once I ran away with a friend who lived across the street—a girl much older than myself who in later life achieved a certain fame. Because she murdered a half-dozen people and was electrocuted at Sing Sing. Someone wrote a book about her. They called her the Lonely Hearts Killer. But there, I’m wandering again. Well, finally, I guess I was around twelve, the principal at the school I was attending paid a call on my family, and told them that in his opinion, and in the opinion of the faculty, I was “subnormal.” He thought it would be sensible, the humane action, to send me to some special school equipped to handle backward brats. Whatever they may have privately felt, my family as a whole took official umbrage, and in an effort to prove I wasn’t subnormal, pronto packed me off to a psychiatric study clinic at a university in the East where I had my I.Q. inspected. I enjoyed it thoroughly and —guess what?—came home a genius, so proclaimed by science. I don’t know who was the more appalled: my former teachers, who refused to believe it, or my family, who didn’t want to believe it— they’d just hoped to be told I was a nice normal boy. Ha ha!”  –Truman Capote, in a 1957 interview with The Paris Review

*

“We are students of words: we are shut up in schools, and colleges, and recitation -rooms, for ten or fifteen years, and come out at last with a bag of wind, a memory of words, and do not know a thing.”  –Ralph Waldo Emerson, in New England Reformers, 1844

*

“I wasn’t smart enough [for college]. By that I mean I lacked a particular kind of organizational discipline or intelligence. I had the reading under my belt. I had the analytical chops. I was a magpie for picking up facts and dates. But to do well at college—there’s no way around it—you have to be able to organize your time, which I could not do to save myself. I’d get started on one thing, and twenty minutes later I’d be off on another, in the midst of which I’d pick up some book on calculus or archaeology or Galois theory and read the odd hundred pages about that. I was intellectually all over the place. I was writing music, directing plays, acting in them, singing in folk groups, choreographing dances, and if I had a paper due next week, there was at most a one-out-of-five chance I would finish it—some of which, yes, was the bad side of Dalton, because they’d been fairly accepting of that sort of thing and had often been willing to cut me some slack. But I didn’t have the discipline. Still, not once did I ever think, Hey, I’m superior to all of this! I never thought, I know more than these people. When I flunked out, I flunked out miserably, spectacularly, and I was mortified. I thought, The truth is out, I’m an idiot. Now everyone knows.

It took me a while to realize that if a teacher had taken me aside and said, “Come on, Chip, sit down, let’s talk, this is how you have to do this,” probably I would have learned how to negotiate it. But nobody did.”  –Samuel R. Delany, in a 2011 interview with The Paris Review

*

“Schools and schoolmasters, as we have them today, are not popular as places of education and teachers, but rather prisons and turnkeys in which children are kept to prevent then disturbing and chaperoning their parents.”  –George Bernard Shaw

*

“Let none say that I am scoffing at uneducated people; it is not their uneducation but their education that I scoff at. Let none mistake this for a sneer at the half-educated; what I dislike is the educated half. But I dislike it, not because I dislike education, but because, given the modern philosophy or absence of philosophy, education is turned against itself, destroying that very sense of variety and proportion which it is the object of education to give. No man who worships education has got the best out of education; no man who sacrifices everything to education is even educated. . . . What is wrong is a neglect of principle; and the principle is that, without a gentle contempt for education, no gentleman’s education is complete.”  –G.K. Chesterson in The Illustrated London News, 1930

*

“What does education often do? It makes a straight-cut ditch of a free, meandering brook.”  –Henry David Thoreau, Journal, 1850

*

“I never really expected to find myself giving advice to people graduating from an establishment of higher education. I never graduated from any such establishment. I never even started at one. I escaped from school as soon as I could, when the prospect of four more years of enforced learning before I’d become the writer I wanted to be was stifling.

I got out into the world, I wrote, and I became a better writer the more I wrote, and I wrote some more, and nobody ever seemed to mind that I was making it up as I went along, they just read what I wrote and they paid for it, or they didn’t, and often they commissioned me to write something else for them.

Which has left me with a healthy respect and fondness for higher education that those of my friends and family, who attended Universities, were cured of long ago.”  –Neil Gaiman, in his commencement address to the University of the Arts class of 2012