Page 190 - A Mind For Numbers: How to Excel at Math and Science

head to figure out the basics. Cajal learned all the more deeply, however, because
he was driven by his personal goals.

“What a wonderful stimulant it would be for the beginner if his instructor, instead of
amazing and dismaying him with the sublimity of great past achievements, would reveal
instead the origin of each scientific discovery, the series of errors and missteps that
preceded it—information that, from a human perspective, is essential to an accurate
explanation of the discovery.” 3
—Santiago Ramón y Cajal

Inventor and author William Kamkwamba, born in 1987 in Africa, could not

afford to attend school. So he began teaching himself by going to his village’s
library, where he stumbled across a book titled Using Energy. But Kamkwamba
didn’t just read the book. When he was only fifteen years old, he used the book
to guide him in active learning: He built his own windmill. His neighbors called
him misala—crazy—but his creation helped begin generating electricity and
running water for his village and sparked the growth of grassroots technological
innovation in Africa. 4

American neuroscientist and pharmacologist Candace Pert had an excellent
education, earning a doctorate in pharmacology from Johns Hopkins University.
But part of her inspiration and subsequent success arose from an unusual source.
Just before entering medical graduate school, she hurt her back in a horseback-
riding accident and spent a summer under the influence of deep pain
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medication. Her personal experiences with pain and pain medication drove her
scientific research. Ignoring her advisor’s attempts to stop her, she made some of
the first key discoveries involving opiate receptors—a major step forward in
understanding addiction.
College isn’t the only way to learn. Some of the most powerful and
renowned people of our time, including powerhouses Bill Gates, Larry Ellison,
Michael Dell, Mark Zuckerberg, James Cameron, Steve Jobs, and Steve

Wozniak, dropped out of college. We will continue to see fascinating innovations
from people who are able to combine the best aspects of traditional and
nontraditional learning with their own self-taught approaches.
Taking responsibility for your own learning is one of the most important
things you can do. Teacher-centered approaches, where the teacher is considered
to be the one with the answers, may sometimes inadvertently foster a sense of