Assange: No Secrets

http://edition.cnn.com/2010/LIVING/12/01/assange.profile/index.html


http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2010/06/07/100607fa_fact_khatchadourian?currentPage=all

“Most of this period of my childhood was pretty Tom Sawyer.  I had my own horse. I built my own raft. I went fishing. I was going down mine shafts and tunnels.”

Assange’s mother believed that formal education would inculcate an unhealthy respect for authority in her children and dampen their will to learn.  “I didn’t want their spirits broken,” she told me. In any event, the family had moved thirty-seven times by the time Assange was fourteen, making consistent education impossible. He was homeschooled, sometimes, and he took correspondence classes and studied informally with university professors. But mostly he read on his own, voraciously. He was drawn to science. “I spent a lot of time in libraries going from one thing to another, looking closely at the books I found in citations, and followed that trail,” he recalled.  He absorbed a large vocabulary, but only later did he learn how to pronounce all the words that he learned.