School

It’s a fair bet that anyone who taught mathematics to the young Albert Einstein dined out on the story. The teacher who had the most influence on Einstein, however, was the one who taught him to read and write. None of Einstein’s math teachers saw the genius lurking there, but his theories were published in scientific papers and he needed writing.

Nobody can know how much influence a school has on an individual. I have a friend who left school with no qualifications and was described by his head teacher as “ineducable.” He is now an award-winning novelist and poet with a Ph.D. You could say the education system failed him, but he did learn to read and write even if, when I first knew him, his reading was confined to the sleeve notes of his Elvis collection.