Clifford Stoll @ TED

I’m not big on mainstream education. I’m almost entirely self-educated when it comes to the subject I love, however I do wonder sometimes if I would have fared better if I had the patience and energy for mainstream education. I tried it again recently in CIT as an experiment and found that I still don’t have those attributes, but that just proves that I can’t (or won’t), not that it wouldn’t make me a different person if I could.

While my own laziness is much to blame for this, I still feel teachers have a lot to answer for. I’ve had some superb teachers – Peter O’Brien in Douglas Comm probably taking first place – but most have been decidely average, and many utterly useless. My commerce and early science teachers in that same school, for example, were so boring I’m utterly amazed anyone remembers anything they say, ever. And if anything, the standard of education is getting worse in this country, not better.

I think I’d be a very different person and we’d all be a lot better off if we had people like this educating us, and our children.

Although I wonder if we’d ever want to leave school…