Success Beyond Performance: Einstein, Edison, Franklin

Most of the time a student’s achievement in education is measured by grades. Can you achieve more success in life with higher grades? Grades portray what the teacher or professors believe to be the best or worst answer. A student could learn a lot in a class but have a bad grade because of a lack of work ethic or bad testing. Albert Einstein is a great example of somebody who was portrayed as “lazy” and didn’t get the grades he was capable of getting. Thomas Edison attended school for only three months before dropping out. At the age of 10, Benjamin Franklin dropped out of school.

A Nobel Prize winning physicist, Alberta Einstein, was once described, as a child, mentally slow because of the fact he could not speak until the age of three and had a funny looking cone shaped head. Einstein had dropped out of high school because of his boredom and “the dull regimentation and unimaginative spirit of school”. Once his family decided to move from his hometown of Munich, Germany to Milan, Italy he made the decision to drop out of secondary school and attend the Swiss Polytechnic in Zurich. In college professors described him as lazy. This reason being, he skipped class and only come to tests from which he would study from his classmate’s notes or not study at all. None of Einstein’s professors liked Einstein because of his poor work ethic and average grades. Although Einstein did not try in school and did not get the best grades, he later went on to write three different world-changing papers. The first of his papers was on Brownian Motion. Einstein experimented the motion of particles that are randomly distributed by fluid, which was successful, leading to him writing an important paper on 20th-century physics. His second paper was on the Photoelectric Effect, which includes the hypothesis concerning the nature of light. Einstein’s third paper was revolutionary. His paper was on the theory of relativity. The theory of relativity, in short, was the measurement of time and space. All of these led a school dropout, who had average to below-average grades, to winning a Nobel Prize.

Thomas Edison only attended public school for three months. Thomas Edison’s schoolteacher wrote his mother a letter. In that letter his teacher had called him addled (mentally ill), Edison’s mother hid the letter from him and decided to drop him out and homeschool him so that he could reach his full potential. In the years of being homeschooled, Edison discovered a love for knowledge and reading in which he took upon himself to learn new things rather than attend his mother’s homeschooling. At the age of 12 Edison convinced his parents to let him take up a job. He began selling newspapers and devoted his spare time to experimenting with printing presses and with electrical and mechanical devices. In 1879 Edison had invented the electric light bulb. The electric light bulb was the most important invention Edison had come up with and the most revolutionary. Edison went on to invent and develop an electric development system, sound recording device, and motion picture projector. This showing that a child that is deemed “mentally ill” because of his lack of effort in class is really just a title. Edison went on to prove that he is anything but mentally ill, and really a pure genius.

The country’s greatest statesmen, Benjamin Franklin, happened to drop out of school at the mere age of 10 years old and joined hid father’s business. At age 13, Franklin was apprenticed by his brother James who had a printing press, which in turn, helped Franklin learn the printing trade. Throughout the 1730’s Franklin had a job printing work for the government. In 1741, Franklin invented the Franklin stove. The Franklin stove is a cast-iron stove for heating a room. Being the postmaster of Philadelphia, he worked on several projects including the police force, the University of Pennsylvania, and the fire brigade (just to name a few). After this, he was named the Postmaster General of America and played a large part in the war effort between England and France. Benjamin had little to no schooling in his life, yet he had so much knowledge and determination to share with the world.

The fact that some of the world’s smartest, most knowledgeable humans to invent and create such important things that we depend on today, dropped out of school or had bad grades is baffling. Albert Einstein, Thomas Edison, and Benjamin Franklin are only a few people to name that prove a student’s achievements in education are not only based on grades. Examples of grades portraying what the teacher or professors believe to be the best or worst answer, is clear in Einstein and Edison’s cases. Yes, some individuals can achieve success by having good grades, but it does not guarantee success . . . . And neither do bad grades.