Einstein, the famous home educated kid

I have mentioned here before that at one time I was quite involved with the gay scene, forty years ago back in the days of the GLF. One of the curiosities of the more militant gays at that time was that they were very keen to prove that practically every famous person in history had really been gay. Any character who came up, from Napoleon to Alexander the Great, Hitler to Jesus, would be claimed as gay. I have in recent years noticed the same tendency on the part of home educators to pretend that a lot of famous and successful people were in fact educated at home. Almost invariably, the list of such people is headed by Albert Einstein.

Now some of the people who are supposed to have been home educated might have spent a year or two being tutored at home or had a governess or something. C. S. Lewis often turns upon these lists, due to his having started school at eight instead of five. Others were born before schooling was common or lived in an area where there really were no schools. In the case of Einstein though, there can be no possible reason for pretending that he was educated at home. Shortly before his sixth birthday, Einstein was enrolled at a Catholic primary school. Three years later he began attending the Luitpold Gymnasium, where he stayed to the age of fifteen. When his parents moved to Italy in 1894, Einstein stayed at the school in Germany for a while, before following his parents, who had now moved to Switzerland, and at the age of sixteen applying to the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, from which he later graduated.

I suspect that many minority groups play this game of 'Lots of famous people were gay/Freemasons/Jews/Home educated'. Home educators, are definitely a little bit over the top about it though. I am afraid that the claim that Einstein was home educated has caused a good deal of amusement among those who know the value of schools. He had a brilliant mind, but it was developed and cultivated not by home education but by the rigorous educational system operating in late nineteenth century Germany. He was a product of formal schooling.