In James Marcus Bach’s book, Secrets of a Buccaneer Scholar, he talks about how he became a very successful person despite dropping out of high school. After the 10th grade, Bach ended up dropping out of high school. In his book, on page 3,  he shows his report card from 9th and 10th grades. He talks about how he very much loves math, and in 9th grade was able to take both geometry and trigonometry. His report card shows no grades for those classes because he took a summer calculus course at University of Vermont, so he skipped the finals. His report card also shows in 10th grade, he received a 49 in physics. He says that he loved practicing physics, and studied it at home, calculating different equations relating to spaceships. His explanation is that in school, they teach in such a way that the probability of a student failing physics is minimized. It wasn’t that he didn’t like physics, or struggled learning the course, it was just material that wasn’t interesting to him and he found useful for him to know.

The main gist is that Bach strongly believes that “Education is important. School is not.” His whole story is how he is a very intelligent person, and he self-educated himself. Even though he is a high school dropout, he went on to get a job at Apple Computer as a manager of R&D. He studied on his own and taught himself computer programming. He chooses what he wants to study, unlike school that forces you to learn what they want you to.

Bach dismisses the teacher’s comment that his speech was “dangerous” because he isn’t encouraging the students to throw away education, but rather encouraging them to learn what they want to learn in order for them to be successful in their terms. The only way his speech was “dangerous” was that it threatens the job of the teacher because without students, she has no job.

Kanye West, another successful dropout, gave a presentation many years ago about education. His speech was different from that of Bach’s such that Kanye talked about how it is necessary to stay in school and learn in order to be successful. However, both the views of Kanye and Bach overlap in the sense that it is important that you focus on what you want and you are passionate about in order to succeed.