school dropouts Johnny Depp Christina Aguilera Toni Collette Cameron Diaz Joan Armatrading Louis Armstrong Ansel Adams ... photographer; Presidential Medal of Freedom recipient

Catherine Zeta-Jones John Jacob Astor.... America's first multimillionaire. Jane Austen.... British author (elementary school dropout) Matt Dillon..... Oscar-nominated actor > from list: Noted High School and Elementary School Dropouts > related book: Genius Denied : How to Stop Wasting Our Brightest Young Minds

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Blanca Garibay, 18, an Options for Youth [California] student, sometimes takes son Andy to the learning center. (photo by Genaro Molina /  Los Angeles Times )

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We don't need no education. We don't need no thought control. No dark sarcasm in the classroom. Teacher, leave those kids alone. Hey, teacher, leave those kids alone! from The Wall / Pink Floyd [audio cd] image from The Wall (1982) [dvd]

school and being exceptional Einstein was expelled from school [in 1894] for “undermining the authority of his teachers and being a disruptive influence.” Most public schools may not have advanced much since then for recognizing and nurturing people with exceptional talents. > from article : Getting out of school alive - by Douglas Eby

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Heidi Kaloustian is the first student to be honored as a laureate for work in literature by the Davidson Institute for Talent Development Foundation. Heidi, 17, says she doesn’t “like the idea of being called a genius” and feels just like any other girl. “It’s something I’ve always done. I think there’s different mediums through which people connect with others and writing is mine.... My greatest fear is losing that curiosity and drive to learn.

"A lot of adults lose their imagination and will to learn. Even kids do. But not me.” [University of Michigan newspaper - The Michigan Daily michigandaily.com] > related book by the Davidson Institute: Genius Denied : How to Stop Wasting Our Brightest Young Minds

NERD RANTS - Latinos Lag Behind in Academics - by Robin Zhou So why are our Advanced Placement classes 90 percent Asian? Two factors contribute significantly that influence students' academic progress from the first year of school.

The first is cultural: many Asian parents, especially recent immigrants, push their children to move toward academic success, while Hispanic parents are well-meaning but less active. Since kids are concerned mainly with the present, little parental involvement often means they fail to realize that school is not an end in itself but a bridge to better things. > excerpt from "The Moor," Alhambra High School student newspaper March 22, 2005 - reprint posted on LATimes.com; photo by Gina Ferazzi

College degrees will lead us to future happiness, enlightenment, fun, preparation for life, a fulfilling job, as well as national prosperity. At least, that's what we've been told and sold. That's brochure bullshit! Been to a college lately?

Rather than beacons of enlightenment, colleges have become bloated 400 billion dollar a year corporations, islands isolated from the real world, treacherous minefields where free speech and individual liberty often get trampled. And not only that, but going to college offers no sure path to an enriching life…or even a blue-collar job! > from website of the College episode of the Penn & Teller: Bullshit! series on Showtime - site has links to experts from organizations such as National Center on Education and the Economy; The Princeton Review; FIRE (Foundation for Individual Rights in Education) and others.

"Think talented teenagers can conceive, design, develop, test, evaluate and market ideas and products to change the world? IMSA does -- and in 2004-05 will launch its Total Applied Learning for Entrepreneurs (TALENT) program." text & photo from IMSA [Illinois Mathematics and Science Academy] site

"I'm just a weirdo," Jena Malone says. "I'm a firm believer in self-education. I like learning one thing and learning it well. I'm a student for life. I read a lot. I make assignments for myself." She reads constantly, particularly when she's on set, to conserve her energy and keep the stories flowing... "Pride and Prejudice" on the set of the Hollywood weepy "Stepmom," Don DeLillo's "White Noise" during the surreal "Donnie Darko," and on "Saved" she kept her nose in Kenzaburo Oe. from article The anti-ingenue - Jena Malone's roles (and life) are more raw than glossy.. By Rachel Abramowitz, LA Times, May 30 2004

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"I was so much younger than my peers," says Carr. "In high school, I was teased about being a virgin.  Soon, I wanted to do the things my friends were doing, even though I was younger." 

As a teen, Carr started drinking with older classmates. Now she realizes that although she was "book smart," she lacked the maturity to be in high school.

Carr has also had more recent problems with acceleration. Because he tested well, Carr enrolled her son Alonzo Jr. in kindergarten at age 4 in 1998.

But he wasn't socially prepared, and he began overturning chairs and tossing books in class. 

Alonzo was eventually diagnosed with a behavior disorder. Last year, the Carrs decided to have him repeat Grade 4. Working with age peers for the first time, he now gets straight A's. ///

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"When we ask exceptional children about their main obstacle, they almost always say it's their school," says Jan Davidson, a co-author of the new book Genius Denied: How to Stop Wasting Our Brightest Young Minds. 

"Their school makes them put in seat time, and they can't learn
at their own ability level."

> from article Saving the Smart Kids - Are schools leaving the most gifted children behind if they don't allow them to skip ahead? By John Cloud/Thornburg, Time Magazine Sep 27, 2004

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..the inner lives of educated, talented women

For 30 years, America has been turning out gifted girls -- athletes, student leaders, artists and writers, science whizzes. Cheered on by parents, teachers, and coaches, they go to college and universities and do brilliantly. 

Routinely, they head off from graduate and professional schools to demanding positions in business, philanthropy, medicine, the law. 

They do everything asked of them and more, but unaccountably, as they draw closer to the vocations for which they've long been preparing, a cloud gathers over them. 

By turns hectoring and anxious, a gloomy chorus announces that success will deplete their romantic prospects and cheat them out of the families they want to have. 

It seems that Virginia Woolf's imagined adversary, the Victorian Angel in the House -- she who always put her own needs second -- rises to flap triumphantly over the times, despite Woolf's hope that modern women would kill her. 

Anna Fels, a practicing psychiatrist in New York City, has arrived to wrestle with the Angel. In Necessary Dreams, she mixes the empirical findings of social science, her own observations from 20 years of clinical work, anecdote, and cultural analysis to question why and how ambition is leached out of American women's lives.

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Whether you believe women are as embattled as Fels does, her book reframes the struggle for equality in a powerful way. 

She goes beyond debates over employment discrimination, harassment, and the problems of working mothers. 

What she's after are the buried psychological debilities that afflict women in their working lives outside their homes: the ways in which, she maintains, they feel compelled in a thousand different ways to take themselves out of the picture.

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Unlike New York, there are not very many non-commercial venues for exposure.

We extend that thinking into our realm by giving artists a chance to do things in a laboratory kind of environment." ///

James Elaine, Curator of Hammer Projects, the museum's division dedicated to exhibiting the work of young artists : 

I don't think there is another museum in L.A. doing what we are doing the way we are doing it. 

We made a conscious decision that it was important for the Hammer in creating its own identity to give ourselves up to younger artists and to bring an audience here who had never set foot in the building before.

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...Genius Denied: How to Stop Wasting 
our Brightest Young Minds
by Jan & Bob Davidson with Laura Vanderkam

Wenyi, a highly accomplished young woman we know, went to a traditional high school in Illinois.

The school offered numerous AP classes and humanities electives, but Wenyi still felt she had outgrown the place by her junior year. 

The curriculum didn't challenge her. The school didn't value intellectual talents like it could have. 

Once, an assembly intended to honor many student accomplishments became a rally for the football team, which had narrowly missed winning the state championship. 

Wenyi had just won a national science award. The principal forgot to bring her plaque.

In her sophomore year Wenyi met her journalism teacher, who was to become a major influence in her life. 

They didn't like each other at first, and they fought a number of skirmishes over assignments, but soon came to recognize each other's talents.

Her teacher, Wenyi says, was never content to just run a high school newspaper. 

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She helped Wenyi hone her writing. She encouraged her to attempt big stories on subjects like teens losing parents, plagiarism and dating violence. 

She pushed Wenyi to enter contests, and sure enough, she won them. As Wenyi pushed herself to try more and more new contests, activities, and research projects through high school, her journalism teacher kept her level-headed and sane. ...

Wenyi also found a mentor to teach her science and math skills that went far beyond her high school's offerings. 

She wanted to try an original scientific research project, so she and her parents asked around. Dr. Jin Wang, a friend of a friend, was enlisted to see if Wenyi could work with him at the Argonne National Laboratory...

She used [her] mathematical skills to model gasoline sprays for fuel injection technology using computer programming to transform thousands of lines of code into 3-D images. ....