The goal of formal education has always been to produce people who could continue to learn on their own.
I guess a certain amount of temperament is expected of Chess geniuses
Fischer was a good kid but very unsophisticated about anything but chess. It was all chess for him, every waking moment. We'd go down to the Four Continents bookstore and he'd buy any Russian chess material he could get his hands on. He'd learned enough Russian to get the gist of prose and he just absorbed the chess part.
