Get Lost, Kid – The American Spectator | USA News and PoliticsThe American Spectator

EITHERne of the most striking things about higher education is that many of the world’s greatest geniuses never had much, if any.

Johann Sebastian Bach was 18 years old and never went to school again; his five years in a local gymnasium and a church school were more than sufficient to instruct him in theology and the classical languages, but his real instruction in music came from his elder brother, the church choir, and musicians and organists he met and made music with. (READ MORE: Living Crucifixes: The Phenomenon of Stigmata)

Thomas Edison spent only a few months as a small boy in the local public school. He was so disruptive there and so frustrated that his mother decided to teach him on her own. When he came to machines and inventing things, the boy was self-taught. If he were alive today, he would be diagnosed with a brain disorder. Some disorder! It saddled him with distraction from trivialities, while it compelled him to pay full attention, even to be absorbed to the exclusion of everything else in the world, to what fascinated his mind with it. We would give young Tom a drug, and that would be the end of Tom the boy inventor.

Michelangelo had no formal education at all. He was a boy hanging about the marble quarries of Settignano, an already talented apprentice in the studio of the painter Domenico Ghirlandaio, and a young hanger-on at Marsilio Ficino’s “Academy” on the estate of Lorenzo de’ Medici. There he took part in conversations on Platonic philosophy, and whatever else the members of the informal group were interested in. He did not learn his craft from him there.

Where Are Our Modern Bachs, Michelangelos, and Edisons?

We are, to be sure, talking about exceptional men: arguably, the greatest composer, the greatest inventor, and the greatest artist in the history of the world. But we are not talking about exceptional cases. The stories of Bach, Edison, and Michelangelo are repeated, at a lower pitch perhaps, in the stories of countless men of great and dynamic accomplishment who became what they were in spite of their having little or no association with colleges and universities.

Many of them left school at a very early age to do what they longed to do. I used the phrase “in spite of,” when I might have written “because of.” In those days, there was nothing on a screen to distract the young mind from its passions or to waste youth and energy on ephemera. The boys developed the ability, early on, to exclude everything from their field of vision but the thing to be mastered, the thing to be accomplished. What would they have done had they had higher education too — or had the world been organized so that they could not work without the paper credentials the colleges sell? (READ MORE: Critics of Lolita Need to Learn How to Read Fiction)

Very likely, nothing much. We cannot suppose they would have been more inventive at their work. For now that everyone of at least modest intelligence must go to college, and absolutely everyone must graduate from high school to get a half-decent job, you would think we would meet a Bach, an Edison, and a Michelangelo in every big town and city.

After all, near-Bachs, near-Edisons, and near-Michelangelos there were plenty in those other times and places, many of whom likewise shared the advantage of freedom from the formal school. We had, for example, near-Bachs in America among the big band leaders and composers, very few of whom had a college education. Where are they now?

College Is Useless for Imparting Genius

This year will be my 40th as a professor at the college level, 37 of them as a professor of English or Humanities. I love my work. I enjoy being around young people, and I am prompted by the teacher’s characteristic impulse, to show someone else something beautiful or fascinating that he has found. But I am under no illusions about the corruption of the university.

Many courses and whole departments are given over not to that impulse but to political or social action, to propaganda in the worst sense; or to instilling in students a hatred or disdain for what past generations — mainly, ordinary people with ordinary feelings — considered to be good or true. Still other courses and departments are mere credentialing services, enabled by the artificial bottleneck that employment law in the United States has created.

To see the bottleneck, one need only ask an obvious question regarding Bach, Edison, or Michelangelo. Who would now hire them? Would Edison be permitted to teach shop in your local high school? Could Bach be hired to compose or conduct music for one of the movie studios, without college credentials? Could Michelangelo secure a commission as the architect of a new county courthouse, without a degree in architecture?

Please do not say that Michelangelo would now need to learn things that can only be taught in a formal setting. The logistical and material problems that beset him when he worked on the dome of Saint Peter’s Basilica, without our diesel-powered tools, without computer projections, without light but strong metals, were at least as difficult as anything that the architect now sets. If Michelangelo could figure out how to solve problems then, he could figure out how to solve comparable problems now.

The Government Shouldn’t Force Employers to Tell Genius Kids to Get Lost

Why should there be a bottleneck at all? Here we meet some touchy issues. Suppose that federal and state governments have no say in telling you who you must hire, either in the individual case or in general. You might then, it is feared, discriminate — but discrimination is, in one sense or another, essential to all evaluation, including that of hiring or not hiring someone. If you are sensitive, you will not use as a criterion for discrimination anything irrelevant to the work to be done, in the workplace where it is to be done. That would be like turning away George Washington Carver because of his race. It would be stupid.

It would be in favor of your competitor. But if the bottleneck were gone, you would be free to take credentials for what you believe they are worth and to evaluate talent by your best lights. Millions of people would be freed from having to procure those credentials. (READ MORE: A Sacred Peace: The Promise and Perils of Localism)

As I write, a crew of young men from Brazil is at work on my house at a big carpentry and painting job. I am too old now to do many of these things myself, as I used to do, although I could never do the splendid job they are doing. I doubt whether any of the men has formal education beyond high school. Who cares? They are masters at their work.

The connection between the hand and the mind is extraordinarily strong so that the more you work with your hands at subtle tasks — such as, to mention a relatively simple thing, cutting a board to fit exactly where it must go, maneuvering it into place, and securing it with nails angled in — the smarter you become.

The hands acquire a “feel” for what is right: good wood for this or that purpose, good stone, good metal, good ground. That the imagination works also through the hands, no musician who has composed upon the piano can doubt. But formal education has little to do with the hands. It may well coat their hands in the rubber of verbiage so that they lose their sense of realities.

I am not a libertarian. But in this regard, I say it is time to end surveillance over employers as whom they hire and why so that the Edisons, Carvers, Bachs, and Michelangelos of the world, and all those lesser but still brightly shining lights that are like them , may thrive without having to pay the collegiate extortionist, and without the strong possibility that they will waste or stifle their genius as they muddle through.

No more need the employer say, “Get lost, kid. “You don’t have the degree.” He might say, “All right, show me what you can do.”