Fun Fact

The history of formal education is largely a history of attempting to manage obstreperous students — and occasionally failing spectacularly. Winston Churchill was considered so obstreperous at Harrow that his housemasters wrote letters home describing him as the most difficult boy in the school. Einstein was reportedly so disruptive and resistant to conventional instruction that one teacher told him directly he would never amount to anything. Edison was pulled from school entirely after only three months, his teacher having declared him too obstreperous to teach. The pattern is consistent enough that some educational psychologists now argue that obstreperousness in gifted children is less a behavioral problem than an early warning system for a mind that has outgrown its container.