However, this doesn’t mean that education has to be boring. The classical education method actually reinforces the idea that students should be encouraged to do what they find naturally enjoyable during certain phases in their lives.

For example, children in grammar school are great at memorizing things. They enjoy reciting songs and rhymes. Sometimes they like it so much that they make up their own. In this method, the grammar phase relates to this inclination by concentrating on factual learning.

If you have ever had a child in the junior high years you are probably aware that children in this stage are very likely to question and argue. The classical education method applies this tendency to logic and reasoning.

In this phase, children need to learn how to argue based on the facts that they learned in the grammar phase.

When a child hits the third and last phase, normally in the high school years, students’ interests shift from internal to external concerns.

Teenagers in this phase are more prone to have concerns how they are perceived. In the rhetoric phase, children are taught how to share their thoughts and ideas so that they are well understood.

A classical education helps children develop a true sense of success. Because the classical education method holds children to an objective standard, they obtain a better sense of what they can and cannot do. This type of educational method provides a practical and accurate assessment of a child’s capabilities.

Learning, hard work, and fun can be intertwined. Learning in each of the stages should be enjoyable and challenging. When students learn according to the stage that they are in, it is easy to recognize that students love to learn.

Learning can be very exciting for children. This way of teaching increases an appreciation for education in children, and their desire to pursue additional knowledge.

Adult education is teaching something to adults. It is sometimes referred to as continuing education and many times happens in the workplace. Many businesses require it if you want to make more money and assume more responsibility in your career.

Here is a common scenario that may even be happening to you or has happened to you in the past.

You have a high school education and could not afford to go to college. You start with your company as an entry level person, let’s say a delivery person. You work hard and do a good job and are promoted inside to a warehouse worker. You show up early, stay late and over time you become the warehouse manager. So far you have invested only time into your career. You have no student loans to repay and your adult education to this point is on the job training.

As you set in meeting with other managers you begin to dream about getting out of the warehouse and into the office. The only problem is to become a office manager or branch manager for your company they require a bachelor of science degree in business. There is an opportunity here however.

Your company offers continuing education by agreeing to pay 50% of the tuition cost with an up to 100% reimbursement upon graduation. You enroll at a local state university that offers evening and weekend classes to people just like you. You buckle down and do the impossible, graduating with a B.S. in Business Administration in a few short years.

Gradually you work your way into an inside managers position and eventually you running the most profitable branch in your company, a true success story. It was all made possible by your work ethic, your brains, and your companies commitment to adult education and promoting from within.

Stories like this happen all of the time. Getting more education or even education in a whole new field is easier now then ever. Colleges recognize a huge market in workers who need more education. The internet offers a never ending supply of college courses right in the comfort of your own home.

One other market is people who just want to learn about something that does not even relate to work and they take a college course at their local community college to do it. You are never to old to learn something.

Regardless of the reasons adult education is within the reach of almost everyone. Putting together a plan and then going for it is a matter of personal choice and motivation.

It is interesting to note that a review of biographical sources, however, provides little or no evidence to support this assertion.

According to LD lore Einstein failed to talk until the age of four, the result of a language disability. It is also claimed that Einstein could not read until the age of nine. To strengthen their case LD proponents point to such facts that Einstein failed his first attempt at entrance into college and lost three teaching positions in two years.

While this makes a nice story, this widely believed notion is false, according to Ronald W. Clark’s comprehensive biography of Einstein, and according to “Subtle is the Lord: The Science and Life of Albert Einstein,” a biography by Abraham Pais (Oxford University Press, 1982).

Pais states that although his family had initial apprehensions that he might be backward because of the unusually long time before he began to talk, Einstein was speaking in whole sentences by some point between age two and three years. According to Clark, a far more plausible reason for his relatively late speech development is “the simpler situation suggested by Einstein’s son Hans Albert, who says that his father was withdrawn from the world even as a boy.” Whether one accepts this interpretation, other information helps us to judge Einstein’s language abilities after he began to speak.

Einstein entered school at the age of six, and against popular belief did very well. When he was seven his mother wrote, “Yesterday Albert received his grades, he was again number one, his report card was brilliant.” At the age of twelve Einstein was reading physics books. At thirteen, after reading the “Critique of Pure Reason” and the work of other philosophers, Einstein adopted Kant as his favorite author. About this time he also read Darwin. Pais states, “the widespread belief that he was a poor student is unfounded.”

FAILING HIS COLLEGE ENTRANCE EXAMS

True, Einstein did not pass the college exam the first time he took it. However, aside from being only sixteen, two years below the usual age, the plain fact was he did not study for it. His father wanted his son to follow a technical occupation, a decision Einstein found difficult to confront directly. Consequently, as he later admitted, he avoided following the “unbearable” path of a “practical profession” by not preparing himself for the test.

It is also true that, after graduating from the university, Einstein had difficulty finding a post. This was mainly because his independent, intellectually rebellious nature made him, in his own words, “a pariah” in the academic community. One professor told him, “You have one fault; one can’t tell you anything.”

Also true is that Einstein went through three jobs in a short time, but not because of a learning disability. His first job was as a temporary research assistant, the second as temporary replacement for a professor who had to serve a two-month term in the army. Clark remarks that it is “difficult to discover but easy to imagine” why Einstein held his third job, as a teacher in a boarding school, for only a few months: “Einstein’s ideas of minimum routine and minimum discipline were very different from those of his employer.”

In his article “Was Einstein learning disabled? Anatomy of a myth,” (published in 2004 in the “Skeptics Society & Skeptic Magazine,” a revised version of an article that originally appeared in the March/April 2000 issue of the “Journal of Learning Disabilities”) Marlin Thomas concludes: “Given the meager basis for the claim that Einstein was learning disabled, one has to wonder why it has become so accepted. Part of the reason is the encouragement it gives all of us to know that even geniuses have shortcomings. The claim also enhances the prestige of learning disabled individuals. Any marginalized group benefits from having one of its members be a stellar figure in cultural history. These may be salutary, but the consequence of claiming that Einstein was learning disabled without historical evidence is harmful. It distorts the historical record and it questions the credibility of other claims regarding the learning disabilities of prominent persons.”