EDIT: Sorry for the long post.
You're under the impression that most knowledge can only be attained through school; there seems to be no in-between for you. You believe that, unless someone tells you, you can never know.
Not at all. I just believe that education you paid for can be of higher quality, and can teach you what you want to learn, way faster than trying to learn something on your own. This really applies to anything out there: hiring skilled experts to do something is usually better than doing something yourself (You ever read "Rich Dad, Poor Dad"?)
The man who discovered electricity had to have been told by God, I guess, before he could ever know about electricity, and how it could power certain things. He wasn't born brilliant; he was born exactly like you, a drooling baby who had to learn literally everything from the ground up, per usual for all human beings. Why, then, did he become such a "brilliant" inventor, and Joe Schmoe was just a farmer?
That man has very likely spent years learning about all the things leading up to his discovery of electricity. Very likely at a place of higher learning along with other students as well. Science very rarely happens by self-educated types in their own garages (For a good example of that kind of science, search for over-unity or perpetual motion on YouTube). As for why he became brilliant? In part interest and motivation (maybe the farmer just didn't want anything more), and in part just because his brain was more suited to it. Some people process math and physics concepts better. Some visualize things and have a better grasp of art, music, and language. It has little to do with upbringing though. I would guess it has more do to with genes.
It's very easy to fall into the trap of, "He must've been born a genius!" In reality, people are not. All people are born with very like minds (excluding actual edit: mental disabilities,) and it is through their experiences that they reach a level no other people have ever reached before. There is no such thing as a genius; this is a subjective impression. The smart man can only be smart when everyone else isn't.
The bolded part is a redundant statement that can be applied to everything, and is quite objective. E.g. A tall building is tall because the buildings around it are shorter. It's not just my opinion that this building is tall, nor my opinion that that person is smart. I don't think relativity is subjective. As for the rest, maybe I'm biased in all this. I come from a family of some pretty smart people (Google Tsiolkovsky and Tozoni). Both of my parents went to a Soviet Union public school, yet both were always at the top of their class (my mom is one of those who has gotten a B maybe once in her lifetime). All the other kids were going to the same schools, yet why is she the one who simply "got it" and was able to get to the top while putting in the same amount of work as everyone else? It can't be her upbringing, since her parents rather neglected her. I didn't have good grades in high school, mainly because I almost never did any homework and was often late turning in projects, but that was mostly due to depression issues at the time (the whole in-the-closet gay thing, plus feeling like an adult surrounded by a bunch of immature children). However, I've typically gotten A's and B's on exams despite never studying for them. Most of the time I passed them by just deducing what the answer to a given question was right on the spot, even if I didn't know how to solve the problem before. This while other students around me struggled, and most got B's or C's. (Craziest thing I've done was learn the entire 107 character Japanese Hiragana alphabet, from scratch, 2 hours before the exam, because I kept putting it off, and still got 100% on it.) I don't know why exactly I can do the things I can and why others have trouble with them. I know I have a very high IQ, and psychologists say that that's something that can't really be learned or changed, so I believe them that this is the reason. And, as I've said, I have dealt with a lot of different people out there. Sometimes it's just frustrating how they seem to have such difficulty grasping a concept I'm trying to explain to them, which to me seems so simple. It's not laziness, they just can't process or understand it easily. I.e. some people are just dumb, and not even because they are too lazy to learn to understand something; they just can't do it.
Now the question becomes: How does someone become brilliant? And the answer is simple: they stop assuming everything Ms. Smith says is God-given fact, and pursue an unbiased, objective understanding of the world around them, which is achieved first through observation, otherwise known as an intake of information, then interpretation, which can be related to processing that information--then repeat.
You do need a foundation of facts, or at least "facts," before you can start doing that. As I said, you can't answer the questions if you don't know what the questions are. And that's what schools and universities are SUPPOSED to teach and encourage.
Unless you're making the point that only a school can supply the flow of quality information into a person, I believe it's clear that calling someone brilliant is just another way of calling someone an autodidact; they understand that schools aren't the only method to acquire information, and seek to educate themselves, even, in the case of Einstein, when schools have nothing more to teach.
Actually, my grandfather Oleg Tozoni, though not Einstein, is an excellent example for this. He finished public high school in USSR. He and his whole family was on a Soviet blacklist because of the whole "royal family" thing, and thus he was in hiding when he was about the age to be in a university. So, he learned how to forge university certificates, and would "transfer" to a new university from the old one for a semester or two. There he would take a few classes, and once he saw that the KGB were catching up to him, he would run, leaving at night or as soon as possible, forge a new university certificate claiming to be from his old one, and transfer to a new university at the new place he picked to hide. This way he continued to take classes, despite it being a very difficult thing to fight for. Eventually he graduated with a bachelors, then a masters. By the time USSR caught up to him, he was already working somewhere, and they realized he would be much more valuable working for them than dead. So they hired (forced) him to work at their research labs. He continued to take classes, earning a few PhD's and a post-doctorate (I don't think we have that degree level in USA), and helped teach physics at various universities. Eventually he went from learning from school and others to learning on his own (a Doctorate degree actually requires that you discover and add something to the body of knowledge that no one else knew before. You can't just get it by passing tests). Then he made more discoveries, deduced more physics formulas, published books, became the head of the Kiev Polytechnical Institute (think chief engineer at DARPA) and once moving to USA, spent 15 years inventing a magnetic levitation system the concept of which was long abandoned as being "impossible." He was a genius, and note, he did all these inventions and discoveries after a lifetime of study, not by tinkering in a garage after reading some books. If you look through the biographies of other scientists we call "genius," you'll likely find that they had a similar path of vast amounts of study at university to get to where they are. If he didn't go to a university, I imagine he would have done self-study, and would have been either a really smart employee somewhere, or a low-level inventor whom no one relly knows of or takes seriously (maybe only post-mortem, like Tsiolkovsky). He wouldn't have been the top scientist in all of USSR, that's for sure.
As for why other people aren't brilliant? They had the exact same opportunities to learn as my grandfather. Better even. But they just couldn't cut it. The material was too difficult, they couldn't wrap their minds around it, and they abandoned the field. In my business finance undergrad degree, we started with 3 class-fulls of people pursuing the degree, and the final exam of the final class only had about 12 of us left.
Why, then, do you insist that only "normal" people can become educated through college?
I don't know what you mean by that
I promise you, I've come a long way since the dark ages (a.k.a high school), but I owe very little of my general competence to my brief adventure as a now sophomore in college. I can't legitimately claim myself to be brilliant, for I don't believe any "official" can define what makes someone brilliant or not, but I promise, college is in no way the sole method to achieve an education; rather, it can help, but in the end, you, the individual, are doing the heavy lifting, with or without college.
You do seem to be the intelligent type (Not just based on your writings, but your personality as well), so who knows. Maybe like other smart people, college just seems inadequate to you. To which I would say, try to get to a better college. Once you're done, though, try talking to some people who never even bothered to go. You'll eventually start to see that people are on different levels out there.
And lets not forget the dangers of trusting an institution with every bit of information you receive.
That's what high school is for. You are SUPPOSED to think critically about information in college. At least later on after the sudents have gotten over the "it's like more high school" phase. Sounds like you have a crappy college, too.
I will admit, colleges do a good job at teaching people how to learn, but they shouldn't have to. When a legal adult still does not know how to think on their own, following 13-14 years of supposed education, can we agree that we're facing an epidemic of stupidity?
I didn't say think, I said learn. The skill of being able to force yourself to sit down for a few hours, completely engross yourself in your study material, and actually learn to retain what you have studied. Especially when it comes to tedious and boring material you may have no interest in, but which you may need. That's not a skill people just practice on their own
... This sets a blanket over all students in public school systems who generally hate their experience (either because they didn't want to go or because they had to put up with the people who didn't want to go), which gets mistaken as a hatred for learning in general. ... I generally liked my experience, but after a while, I felt I really was back in high school, learning the same subjects I didn't learn back then, the same subjects I didn't care about but was required of me. ...
I agree that schools have issues that need to be fixed (In USSR, for example, classes weren't adjusted down to compensate those who did bad. You were expected to keep up, period. And other students were expected to help the laggards keep up). But it really sounds like you ended up in a shitty college. Maybe you should research if there is anything better out there, and move there? By the way, I can tell you right now that an Associate's is completely worthless. If jobs are looking for degrees, they will be looking for a BS at least. If they are not, they'll be fine with high school. Your best options are to either go for a BS, or, depending on your skills, go to a specialty school. My friend got an associates in network engineering. It was worthless, and not something he wanted (his parents pushed him into it). Then he spent a year going to a specialist school that only taught truck engine repair, which is what he was interested in. No history, english, or other crap. Now he's happy doing what he likes, and earns a good living.
The problem cannot be colleges, then, who only operate as businesses (except for Phoenix and all the other highway colleges, whose owners are welcome to rot for their crimes against the American populace); the real problem of education is primary. It's the difference between voluntary education and involuntary education, and I believe our American experiment has shown the results of one side of it: we cannot force someone to learn and expect the outcome to be a thinking individual.
You may be right, I don't know. I still believe that people should get a foundation to start with, even if all they want to do is play video games all day. You won't know if you are into art, history, languages, math, computers, biology, chemistry, or whatever if you've never been exposed to it. Finance was not a subject in my school (or if it was, it wasn't a requirement), so I was never exposed to it, and didn't get to realize it was something I was interested in until I was 24, at which point I had to start pursuing that education from scratch. This does remind me that there's a fundamental difference in how kids are taught in USSR versus USA though (I don't know if Japan is similar)...
