Article: UK Telegraph: The idle parent: the less school, the better

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What do Bertrand Russell, William Blake, John Ruskin, William Cobbett
and John Stuart Mill have in common? The answer is that they never
went to school. Yes, many of our greatest and most independent
thinkers were educated by parents, tutors or by the best teachers:
themselves.

Russell and Ruskin were educated at home by a series of tutors. Mill
was taught by his father and by the utilitarian philosopher Jeremy
Bentham. Blake spent his youth wandering around Peckham Rye and seeing
angels. Cobbett was largely self-taught.

That most un-Victorian of Victorians, William Morris, went to a
chaotic early incarnation of Marlborough, where he learnt nothing, and
resumed his education at home.

It is to this lack of formal education that the historian E.P Thompson
attributes Morris's revolutionary brilliance: somehow, he slipped
through the brainwashing net and became a passionate enemy of
Victorian competitive values.

Complete commentary in The Telegraph:

http://www.telegrap h.co.uk/educatio n/main.jhtml? xml=/education/ 2008/03/15/ faidleparent. xml