From CGI member oldmaninthedesert:

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Author's Note: I've spoken about 1,500 times since I quit school teaching, in every American state and twelve foreign countries, but only two audience members in all that time were so provoked to anger by what I said that they screamed insults at me from their seats. One, in 1992, was the son of a very famous economist from California, and the other, in 1998 (if memory serves), was a very famous stock speculator in New York. The reason I'm telling you this is that the substance of this chapter, albeit with somewhat different details, is what drove those men to rage. So you've been warned.

The idea I'll be arguing here - that free-form "education" the variety I call "open-source" education, is of much higher quality than rule-driven, one-size-fits-all, "testable" schooling - came to me first as a teenage boy when an amazing thing happened to my beloved Uncle Bud Zimmer. I think you'll see what I mean when I tell you Bud's miracle.

Prior to WWII, Bud was a steelworker and a deckhand on the paddle-wheel river steamers which went from Pittsburgh to New Orleans. He was a tough, tough young man, looked a lot like John Wayne in Stagecoach, and the ladies loved him. But he was a high-school dropout. He enlisted to go to war in 1942 when I was seven, and I saw the troop train carry him off one night. Somehow he qualified for Officer's Candidate School, and was eventually shipped off to Europe to join the invasion as a lieutenant. In his platoon was an enlisted man, Al Rockwell, who would one day be heir to the Rockwell Manufacturing empire. Mr. Rockwell, a man of strong libertarian principles, insisted on going into combat as an enlisted soldier. They became friends.

I can't remember what ordinary jobs Bud held when he came back from the war as a Captain, but I do know his CV didn't include a college degree. One day he called me on the phone from Cincinnati, and said that before I went to Cornell he wanted me to work for him "at a real job;' to "stop sponging off your parents and earn your own money:' What job did he have in mind? He said, "I want you to load 12s-pound slabs of steel onto boxcars from nine to five every day. I want you to live with me near the Rockwell plant in Ohio and pay room and board. How's that sound?"

It turned out that Bud was the manager of the plant, employing thousands. "I have two dozen Harvard hotshots working for me;' he said. "They'll do anything I want: shine my shoes, wax my car, but I can't let them see me favoring my nephew, so I'll have to work you twice as hard as anyone else. Is that OK?"

A real job with a grown-up's pay at 16? For that, anything would have been OK! I was too unworldly at the time to even think of the big mystery - how on earth could a common steelworker without an education be ordering Harvard graduates around? And running a huge industrial plant? My mistake was thinking of Bud as a man without an education. He had a superb education: it was only schooling he lacked.

https://exploringrealhistory.blogspot.com/2019/04/part-2-weapons-of-mass.html