Albert Einstein didn’t read until he was eight or nine. Thomas Edison once said: “I remember I used never to be able to get along at school…I almost decided that I was a dunce.” Sir Richard Branson and Ted Turner both describe themselves as dyslexic. Teachers described Auguste Rodin, the sculptor, as “the worst pupil in school”.
Many other great people, transplanted into contemporary society, would also probably have ended up in remedial or learning disability classes, including Winston Churchill, Pablo Picasso, Sergei Rachmaninoff, Leonardo da Vinci, Henry Ford, William Butler Yeats, Agatha Christie, and Hans Christian Andersen.
Each of these talented people possessed an ability–scientific, artistic, musical, political, entrepreneurial, literary— that was irrelevant or even bothersome in a school setting but vital to the betterment and development of civilization.
Alexander McQueen- designer
Francois-Henri Pinault, head of the French luxury group PPR which controls McQueen’s companies, spoke of his friend, calling him a “genius,” a “friend” and a “poet” who was “hurt and lost in a world whose superficiality and lack of ideals he couldn’t accept.”
