Presidents’ Day: five facts you didn’t know about George Washington

Although today has culturally morphed into Presidents' Day over the years, the official holiday is George Washington's birthday -- even though Washington was born on February 22. Here are five little-known facts about the original founding father.

2. He never attended college

AP Photo/Richard Drew
In this file photo from last month, a woman looks at the sculpture "George Washington" by Hiram Powers, in the American Wing of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, in New York.

In fact, Washington had no formal education at all. Just like their father, Washington's two older brothers were sent across the Atlantic Ocean to attend school in England at Appleby School. But when his father died, the promise of George's formal education ended. Instead, he received the equivalent of an elementary school education from a variety of tutors, and he also spent time at a school run by an Anglican clergyman in Virginia. 

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Dear Reader,

About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

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If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.

But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.

The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.

We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”

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