I'm currently reading Louis L'Amour's Education of a Wandering Man.   It's not so much an account of his life as an account of his education and how he learned the things he learned.  As anyone familiar with L'Amour knows, he left school at 15 and traveled the world for the next ten years or so.  What I never knew is why he left school.  It wasn't because he was a hellion or filled with wanderlust, it was because by 15 he had already read so much and filled his head with so much info on subjects from history to philosophy that he realized school just slowed him down.  He felt no need to retread subjects he was already well versed in.

He says that education these days doesn't so much teach a student to think, but to have opinions, which is a completely different thing.

Hits the nail right on the head there, doesn't he?

Another thing that struck me was that he published his first novel, Hondo, when he was 45 years old!  This is a guy who wrote over a hundred books (all of which are still in print) and he did it all in 35 years.  Not only was I really surprised by how long he went without selling a book, although he did sell lots of short stories, I can't get over how prolific he was.

I had known that he didn't believe in writer's block and that he wrote at least five pages every day (none of which may wind up in the final draft) but still... 3 finished books a year is mind boggling.

And for every book he wrote, he read at least ten.  He kept logs of everything he read and in one year, he read 115 books.

And he was interested in everything.  It's not like he read 115 paperback novels in one year, he read philosophy, diaries, history, plays...I'd be hard pressed to come up with a subject or an author, going as far back as Plato, that L'Amour didn't read.

So for any of you who think that education can only be had from a university and without the certificate it means nothing....that's an opinion based on a false premise.

 

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