Wasn't Gates a dropout? Of course, a successful man, but I would not put that much weight in his opinion on education.
Really, what he was best at as I gather is summed up by this:
After reading the January 1975 issue of Popular Electronics that demonstrated the Altair 8800, Gates contacted Micro Instrumentation and Telemetry Systems (MITS), the creators of the new microcomputer, to inform them that he and others were working on a BASIC interpreter for the platform. In reality, Gates and Allen did not have an Altair and had not written code for it; they merely wanted to gauge MITS's interest. MITS president Ed Roberts agreed to meet them for a demo, and over the course of a few weeks they developed an Altair emulator that ran on a minicomputer, and then the BASIC interpreter. The demonstration, held at MITS's offices in Albuquerque, was a success and resulted in a deal with MITS to distribute the interpreter as Altair BASIC
Just because I might be intelligent I can't quite tell someone how to be intelligent. A scientist might be able to however if he does a lot of studies and is able to derive rules etc.
Besides, he is not serially successful, as in build one company and move on to the next, or successful in business, politics, history, medicine, physics. He just wrote one code. As I say sure it took some wits from him to make the deal and intelligence to write the code, but that in no way makes him qualified to know much about education, which is such an extensive topic.
And yes he was a drop out hence his genius idea of accrediting any knowledge however it was gained. If someone has some knowledge there are other ways to prove it to others than through accreditation. We have I think enough pieces of paper which misleads people as to our ability.
My point is just that school can't be the only qualifier for knowing about education- unless the point of education is to make people good at school.
>And yes he was a drop out hence his genius idea of accrediting any knowledge however it was gained. If someone has some knowledge there are other ways to prove it to others than through accreditation. We have I think enough pieces of paper which misleads people as to our ability.
I think most people agree that most certifications are garbage. However, most degrees aren't any better, when it comes to accrediting that a person has a particular skill. It's a hard problem that isn't being solved well by anyone right now.
the thing is, a college degree doesn't say anything about the ability of a person to do a particular job, and people in industry recognize this.
But the idea that you could have a certifying agency say that joe is a level 5 unix Engineer is very attractive to companies... a good certification system would make hiring people way easier.
The problem is that certification is one of those things that's easy to do badly and extremely difficult to do well.
I'd say he knows a hell of a lot more about it than most people.
He did drop out of Harvard, no? Every dropout has an excuse in the end, I'm not going into that. I just don't understand what makes people so upset about this point.
1.) those who dropped out of school due to lack of financial or social resources, or due to personal emotional problems
2.) those who dropped out of school because they had an incredible opportunity to capitalize on their natural talents and take advantage of their favorable surroundings
many successful 'drop-out entrepreneurs' fall in the latter category ... they came from middle-class or upper-middle-class homes, their parents had advanced degrees, they often attended private high schools and prestigious colleges, etc. etc. etc.
i'm afraid that if the meme of "dropping out is cool, just look at zuckerberg, gates, brin/page, etc." keeps propagating, that will give kids who aren't as advantaged (those in the former category) misguided expectations for what awaits them when they drop 'outside of the system'