20 Uneducated Dropouts Who Changed Human History

Education is a great thing. It provides you with unique experiences and arms you with thr knowledge necessary to go out into the world and do great things. Having said that, anyone who tells you only those with a formal education will find success should be kicked right in pants.

We aren't advocating that people not go to school, but it is possible to be crazy successful without having had any formal learning. To help illustrate this, we asked our readers to look comb through history's most prominent individuals and bring us the ones that skipped that whole learning phase to become successful. The winner is below, but first the runners-up ...

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The CRACKEDCON Wright brothers never even graduated from high school. It's okay, it's not like building airplanes is complicated or anything.

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Entry by S Peter Davis

DAVIDBOWIE A ROCK LEGEND A SCREEN LEGEND WHO ONLY EVER WHO ONLY EVER TOOK CLASSES IN TOOK CLASSES IN SAXOPHONE MIME CRACKED.COM

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Entry by tusk1113

CRACKED.COM Dropped out after a single semester in which he studied Shakespeare, Modern Dance, and Calligraphy. Steve Jobs Avid Hobbyist

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Entry by MaryLP

CRACKEDo COM Mo gri Spuunl pur Columou EK NC AE MA In 1964, with only 750 hrs of flight time, this college drop-out and Columbus housewife accomplishe

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Entry by CDO9

Mary Anning was an 18th century amateur fossil collector. Her many discoveries included ichthyosaurus, plesiosaurus and pterodactylus fossils among ot

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Gregor Mendel was just a monk who liked to garden. His observations on the way his sweet pea plants inherited traits from their parent plants formed t

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Entry by Phighter

This is William Kamkwamba from a remote village in Malawi, but you may know him as The Boy Who Harvested the Wind. After dropping out of school at a

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Entry by Scott Laffey

imi endri hailed by Rolling Stone as the GREATEST GUITAR PLAYER IN HISTORY was a self-taught musician who couldn't even read music. CRACKED.COM

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Entry by Jordan Rudow

CRACKEDOONT Charles Darwin Alfred Russel Wallace 1809-1882 1823-1913 Formal Education: Formal Education: 1825 medicine at Edinburgh Six years of gramm

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Entry by djHanDon

JOHN MCCONNLI BIACK- WAS SCOTIISH STUDIED LANGUAGES AND WORKED AS REPORTER FOR EXACTLY HALF OF HS UFE (HE DIED AT 96) BUT AT 48 HE RETIRED AND, MBMERI

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Entry by stackmonster

CRACKED Former British civil servant, journalist, accountant, and vice-president of the Dabney Oil Syndicate, decided, at the age of 44, to try his ha

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Entry by Chan Teik Onn

CRACKEDOON Quentin Tarantino, director of numerous cult classics like Pulp Fiction (1994), dropped out of high school at the of age 15 and had no trai

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Entry by underwaterpat

ED 'DOC' RICKETTS DIDN'T HAVE A COLLEGE DEGREE. AFTER LESS THAN TWO YEARS, HE LEFT THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO FOR CALIFORNA. WITH WADERS AND NOTECARD H

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Entry by Cervus

ORACKEDOOM Renownedl primatologist JANE GOODALL had no college degree or formal scientific training when she began her field studies of chimpanzees in

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CRACKEDCO The crocodile hunter never went to crocodile college. He graduated from high school, but learned how to wrangle crocs on the reptile park hi

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Entry by tusk1113

LEFT SCHOOL AT 16 AND STARTED A YOUTH CULTURE MAGAZINE, THEN A RECORD STORE, THEN A RECORD LABEL, BEFORE MONNG INTO TELECOMMUNICATIONS, A/R TRAVEL, AN

4

Benjamin JFranklin left school at age 10 He went on to found libraries, universities, the post office, made advances in science particularly electrici

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Entry by Nordy

CRACKEDCOT In 1821, Sequoyah, a self-taught Cherokee silversmith, became the only known person in history tO independently develop a writing system wh

2
Entry by michikade

Anton van Leeuwenhoek Father of Microbiology CRACKED.COM A fabric merchant by trade, Leeuwenhoek taught himself how to grind lenses and build his ow

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Entry by MJPatrick

Foredterick Douglass Taught himself and other slaves to read and write in a time and place where doing so was illegal. Became a bestselling author and