Consider four of the most enduring intellects to have worked and written in the English language: Abraham Lincoln, Fredrick Douglass, Jane Austen, and Charles Dickens. They were all educated similarly, but perhaps not how you'd think. Each received little or no formal schooling. Essentially self-educated in an era when self-education meant reading, they rose to eminence by virtue of the skills and knowledge their private reading taught them.
I am not suggesting that their educations provide a model of what education should be. Still, they remind us of the almost unlimited capacity of diligent reading to teach. For all four of these exceptional people and many others, "mere" reading was sufficient to foster and develop rare genius. And as for the rest of us, we are all self-educated, to some degree or another, by virtue of the reading we have done.
-Doug Lemov, Teach Like a Champion
Regardless of whether Lincoln, Douglass, Austen, and Dickens are really the four most enduring intellectuals of the English language, the part about self-education wrought of reading made me smile. Man, I'm going to be so smart by the end of this hundred-book year! heh.
(ps: again, find more books and thoughts about books on Goodreads. And keep those recommendations coming!:)
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