Real Education

From Andrew Sullivan

A Library Degree

The great science fiction writer Ray Bradbury, who died this week, never went to college and considered himself "completely library educated." In a Paris Review interview from a few years ago, he talked about his self-education:

I discovered me in the library. I went to find me in the library. Before I fell in love with libraries, I was just a six-year-old boy. The library fueled all of my curiosities, from dinosaurs to ancient Egypt. When I graduated from high school in 1938, I began going to the library three nights a week. I did this every week for almost ten years and finally, in 1947, around the time I got married, I figured I was done. So I graduated from the library when I was twenty-seven. I discovered that the library is the real school.