Best School? The School Of Life

The best school you can attend is the one you are attending right now - the school of life. This doesn't mean that formal education is worthless. In fact, it not only is more and more necessary for success in certain fields, but it can be a very enriching experience for many people. In other words, it can be a valuable part of life - but education starts before schooling.

With that in mind, here is a look at some people who got almost all of their education from this best school - life. More specifically, these are famous people who dropped out of high school, and still managed to do okay.

Graduates Of The Best School - The School Of Life

Richard Branson is one of the wealthier high school dropouts. He's the billionaire founder of Virgin Music, Virgin Airlines and dozens of other successful businesses. If you read the stories of his bold and creative ways of doing business you'll see that he didn't miss much by skipping a more formal education.

It certainly isn't just businessmen that make this list, however. The mathematician and creative genius Albert Einstein also dropped out of school. So did one of my favorite authors of economic and political philosophy, Thomas Sowell. The comedian George Carlin and the singer Billy Joel are also on the list.

Who else? Here are some other famous high school dropouts:

Jim Carrey... Tom Cruise... George Eastman... Randy Travis... John Travolta... Michael J. Fox... George Gershwin... Dhirubhai Ambani... The Wright brothers... Peter Jennings... Keanu Reeves... Quentin Tarantino... Dave Thomas... Uma Thurman... Ansel Adams.

Undoubtedly you recognize a few of the names here - and this is the the short version. There are more than a dozen billionaires that dropped out of high school, as well as ten Nobel Prize winners, and eight past U.S. presidents. But why bother with such a list? For two reasons:

1. It certainly could encourage those without formal education to keep working towards their dreams and goals.

2. It reminds us that life is the best school. One could think of the various educational institutions as possible "courses" or "majors" in this grander university.

Formal education choices, and the formal credentials they produce, are often over-rated. For example, we are all better off because Bill Gates decided to drop out of college to create some new software. On the other hand, some of the best scientists and thinkers come from the great universities. This isn't about whether one should or shouldn't go to high school or college. It is simply a reminder not to under-rate the best school: life.