As the youngest student to attend Oxford University, Joshua Beckford created history and became well-known throughout the world for his extraordinary intelligence. He was accepted at the age of six into an online school for talented kids between the ages of eight and thirteen, where he flourished in philosophy and history, receiving honours in both subjects.
Joshua became the youngest student to ever take an Oxford course when his father, Knox Daniel, pushed for his entrance despite the institution’s traditional age restrictions. The next youngest Oxford student was at least two years older when they were admitted, so his record is still unbeaten.
At the age of ten months, Beckford was able to recognise letters and numbers, and by the time he was two and a half years old, he was reading fluently and had already started studying some Mandarin and Japanese.
His medical expertise is impressive, and he has aspirations of becoming a neurosurgeon. He has mastered difficult surgical techniques like limb fracture correction, hernia repair, and cataract removal using the Microsoft Surgery Simulator. He demonstrates surgical instrument skills at a level well beyond his years.
Beyond his career in medicine, Beckford is a talented artist, a multilingual speaker, and an IT and sports whiz.
He was recognised as the UK’s Positive Role Model of the Year at the 2017 National Diversity Awards, and the Illumination Foundation of North Carolina named him one of the Top 30 Most Extraordinary People for his contributions to society.
He supports education for low-income families in Nigeria, Ghana, Kenya, Uganda, South Africa, and the UK, where he was born, as an ambassador for the Boys Mentoring Advocacy Network (BMAN).
In addition to leading the National Autistic Society’s Black and Minority Ethnic (BME) campaign, Beckford, who has been diagnosed with high-functioning autism, uses his position to spread awareness.
During a live mentoring session in Nigeria in 2019, Beckford and his father gave a keynote address to about 5,000 people at the University of Lagos (UNILAG). The purpose of their tour was to gather money for a secondary school in Kaduna State that would educate pupils from disadvantaged backgrounds.
His dedication to education and social transformation was further cemented when UNILAG announced that the projected Joshua Beckford Community School will comprise classrooms, an administration block, a laboratory, an ICT centre, and an agriculture green garden.
CREDIT: ALLSCHOOL, Allschoolabs
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