Education

Education is general or specialized. Because it suited me to do so at the time, I prolonged my time at University and emerged years later with academic qualifications but not as yet any work training or career aim.

In Poul Anderson's Shield, because the US urgently needs many trained minds, an "Institute" picks the orphaned, eight-year-old but highly IQ'ed Peter Koskinen along with thousands of others. Ten years later, Koskinen gets his master's in physics with a minor in symbolics and successfully applies to join the ninth Mars expedition that will stay long enough to communicate with the Martians who exist in this particular timeline.

In Neil Gaiman's The Sandman: Worlds' End, Scroyle's father, in exchange for a grave in the necropolis, Litharge, pledges his son, Scroyle, as a prentice. Thus, Scroyle, aged eight, accompanies his father's body to Litharge on the death-barge. Over the next nine years, Scroyle learns how to dig a hole six feet deep and eight long as well as thirty ways to prevent clients from spoiling in the sun and fifty ways to prepare wood for a casket.

Their specialized educations happen to suit them but would not have suited me.