At the tech conference I'm attending, most of the speakers have foreign accents. While there may be some selection bias at play (with 300 million Americans compared to a global population of 8 billion), I think there is more to it than that.
I've often felt that moving to the United States lobotomized me somehow. Granted, if anti-Semites hadn't chased my family from Ukraine, I might be a grunt fighting Russians right now, but:
Between the ages of 6 and 10, I devoured dozens, if not hundreds, of novels, including works by Jules Verne, Arthur Conan Doyle, and Stanislav Lem, as well as nonfiction. I was a competitive chess player, built model submarines and airplanes that actually worked, and pursued many other interests. Within a year of coming to the United States, I had learned English and Hebrew and ranked in the top 1% on standardized tests.
But things went downhill from there. By the time I graduated from high school, my scores had fallen to the top 10%, and then to the top 25% on my GREs. While these are quantitative measures, more importantly, the more education I received, the less clear my direction in life became. By the time I obtained my master's degree, I had zero vision for my future.
Sixteen years of schooling had eroded my passions. The monotony of constant testing and homework wore away at my passions one by one. In junior high, a teacher told me that my math skills were below average, so I should consider becoming an A/C repairman. In high school, a teacher suggested that I abandon my dream of becoming an aerospace engineer and pursue a more practical career. The education system trains obedient factory workers and crushes anyone who deviates from the norm. Only the strongest child can withstand the damage to his self-esteem, and I was not one of them.
I spent the first decade of my career trying to rediscover and rebuild the curiosity, sustained focus, and ambition that schooling had extinguished. Twenty years later, I am once again in the top 1%, but where would I be if I had started 20 years earlier, or if I had skipped schooling altogether and spent 40 years building myself rather than recovering from the trauma of schooling?