From: Michael Lorrey (mike@datamann.com)
Date: Tue Jan 30 2001 - 09:30:34 MST
John Marlow wrote:
>
> You know how many captains of industry were grade school dropouts?
Sure. Plenty, but how many kids did they have???
However, most of them were raised in a day and age when you didn't need
a law degree to be a practicing lawyer, an engineering degree to design
and build bridges, mills, and ships, and the concept of the MBA was a
mere gleam in the eyes of university provosts.
Most such individuals were home schooled, in fact, and frankly I'd pit a
kid with a 6th grade education from 1920 against a current day high
school graduate (or college graduate, even, depending on the college and
major).
My grandmother was one such person, she dropped out of school after 6th
grade to raise her 8 brothers and sisters when her mother died (her
father was an unemployed alcoholic). She worked as a seamstress and maid
in some rich person's mansion, then as a beautician, then she met my
grandfather who became a publishing executive. She never went back to
school, but was the New England Scrabble champion, president of the New
Hampshire Floral Association, and best of all, taught me to read at age
four. She was one tough cookie, a terror to my mother. If she had chosen
to go into business I am sure she would have been the epitome of the
'brass balled bitch' type of female executive and would have fit just
fine into any Rand or Heinlein novel. She was a very self confident and
self aware person who read voraciously her entire life (and not romance
novel crap either). She had three kids, which was pretty below average
for 1940.
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