An autodidact is a person who teaches himself or herself, using books or the internet or whatever other resources are available but not using a teacher or classroom.
I've been autodidacting for much of my life, starting at least in the first year of junior high. They say necessity is the mother of invention, in my case it was necessary to be a self-instructor because I wanted to teach myself from a book which was absolutely forbidden by my family. It was a book called "How To Develop Your Psychic Powers", which I borrowed from a friend whose father was a professional psychic. My parents were very firm Christians and if they knew I was interested in psychic powers, they'd flip. Actually, they did end up finding the book, and boy, that didn't go over well. I continued studying on my own, though, behind their backs.
Of course, I never developed psychic powers. The book was basically full of crap. However, the experience awakened the autodidact in me. Not only was I without a formal teacher, I actually had to study in hiding. Rather than being supported, I was actively hindered by my closest mentors. That experience made me a superautodidact.
STUDYING IN HIDING
If you want to wake up the self-teacher in yourself, one thing you might try is studying something you have to hide. If you live with parents, that's really easy. Just pick whichever religion or philosophy or political ideology would be most offensive and intolerable to them, and start studying! The point isn't to convert to that religion or philosophy or whatever, but to practice studying in hiding. Like training with large weights so you can lift lighter objects easily, studying in hiding will build the muscles needed to learn and teach yourself in general. And anyway, the experience will certainly give you some profoundly new perspectives on the world. If you get caught, be prepared for a real tempest of resistance. If you're strong enough to weather the tempest, that might also make you stronger, and it might even nudge your parents just a little more awake, and make them conscious for a moment of their own limited perspective.
I should emphasize that the point of studying in hiding is not to actually hide yourself from people, but just to train your inner self-teacher, like you'd train weights. I've come to see how important it is to be open and honest with people, because we live short lives and don't have time to squander our public lives in some shell-like mask. So, the studying in hiding exercise is just an exercise in self-teaching, and should not be used to foster some hidden life.
I had the "blessing" of going to a really bass-ackwards Christian high school for 9th grade, where they actually discouraged me from studying calculus. I actually had a calculus book confiscated by my math teacher, because she thought it was distracting me from the algebra class I was officially enrolled in! (None of the teachers at that school knew calculus) Having trained my mathemautodidact muscles in such a hostile environment, when I went on to junior college it seemed like a breeze by comparison.
STUDYING YOUR PASSIONS
You're probably already a a self-teacher, at least to a certain extent. Do you know lots of facts about your favorite TV show or movie or sports team? I assume you never took a class to learn about those. That means you're a self-teacher.
If you want to train your independent study muscles and become a superautodidact, try taking one of your passions and train it further. The real point isn't to become (say) a walking Toronto Bluejays encyclopedia, but just to train yourself to train yourself-- becoming a walking encyclopedia about one of your passions is just a way of doing that.
For example, maybe you're a big fan of the cartoon, King Of The Hill. Then you could practice autodidactism by reading through the King Of The Hill website, buying trivia books about the show, even researching the writers and voice actors. It's all pretty useless info in the big picture of things, but you'll be training your self-teaching muscles, through something you're passionate about and like studying.
SELF-TEACHING ON THE INTERNET
The internet makes self-teaching easier than it's ever been before, and it's getting easier and easier every day. Resources like Wikipedia are a godsend, and now there are forums and communities popping up around the most obscure things.
When I decided to teach myself Japanese, I had almost no idea how to start. At first, I was bumbling around pretty randomly, memorizing vocabulary lists (in useless romanized form), not even knowing what was important or not. I was trying to study Japanese like I studied Spanish in junior college, but Japanese is a much more difficult language than Spanish, in Spanish you can almost get by with just memorizing vocabulary which is conveniently written in the same Roman letters as English. But, I joined a Yahoo! group for people studying Japanese, and from there I was led to Tae Kim's Guide To Japanese Grammar, which put me solidly on the road to Japanese. From there I was even led to Khatzumoto's AJATT Site, which takes Japanese self-study and streamlines it and optimizes it and elitizes it so much it makes mainstream Japanese pedagogy seem like it's from the Dark Ages.
Without the internet, it would have been a lot harder to come as far as I have with Japanese. If my father had tried teach himself Japanese when he was my age, it would have been an almost insurmountable task, short of going and living in Japan.
BENEFITS OF BEING AN AUTODIDACT
If you become a strong self-educator, it will make school seem almost trivial, at least until you get up to graduate courses. I remember sitting in class, listening to the professor lecture about something or other, and thinking, Hey, this is right here in the textbook! I don't even need to be here!
To an autodidact, the class textbook is more than just the source from which exercises are assigned. It can actually be read, and what's more, assuming the textbook matches the course at least decently well, the whole course can be learned on one's own.
When you're an auto-didact, you see a little more clearly through the fake masks of social conditioning which tell us that we are what we do. I'm not an auto mechanic, but I know that if I really, really wanted to fix cars, and devoted all my time to it, I could be fixing cars within three months. I don't know a single thing about cars right now, but I know I could teach myself. Society says that I'm a math grad student and a calculus teacher. But I'm not limited to those fields by any means, I have freedom to learn and do whatever I want. Ten years from now I could be absolutely anything. Even medicine or law, don't intimidate me, I know that if I wanted to, I could pick them up.
And, the same goes for you. You also could start fixing cars within a few months, if you really wanted to, and if your inner self-teacher was in the driver's seat.
Not sure how to start being a self-teacher? First, pick something you'd like to learn about. Then, search the internet. Be willing to learn, and the answers will gradually reveal themselves to you.
OTHER ARTICLES ON AUTODIDACTISM:
Autodidact, PhD
You might be an autodidact if...
FURTHER READING
Skills And Metaskills A metaskill is a skill which involves other skills. Teaching yourself is an example of a metaskill, because it's an ability which lets you learn other abilities.
How To Be A Better Teacher I've found that by teaching others, I've actually gotten better at teaching myself as well. A pro 'didact should brush up on educator skills in general.
Training Self-Discipline Having good discipline and willpower is a great way to be a self-teacher.
I've been autodidacting for much of my life, starting at least in the first year of junior high. They say necessity is the mother of invention, in my case it was necessary to be a self-instructor because I wanted to teach myself from a book which was absolutely forbidden by my family. It was a book called "How To Develop Your Psychic Powers", which I borrowed from a friend whose father was a professional psychic. My parents were very firm Christians and if they knew I was interested in psychic powers, they'd flip. Actually, they did end up finding the book, and boy, that didn't go over well. I continued studying on my own, though, behind their backs.
Of course, I never developed psychic powers. The book was basically full of crap. However, the experience awakened the autodidact in me. Not only was I without a formal teacher, I actually had to study in hiding. Rather than being supported, I was actively hindered by my closest mentors. That experience made me a superautodidact.
STUDYING IN HIDING
If you want to wake up the self-teacher in yourself, one thing you might try is studying something you have to hide. If you live with parents, that's really easy. Just pick whichever religion or philosophy or political ideology would be most offensive and intolerable to them, and start studying! The point isn't to convert to that religion or philosophy or whatever, but to practice studying in hiding. Like training with large weights so you can lift lighter objects easily, studying in hiding will build the muscles needed to learn and teach yourself in general. And anyway, the experience will certainly give you some profoundly new perspectives on the world. If you get caught, be prepared for a real tempest of resistance. If you're strong enough to weather the tempest, that might also make you stronger, and it might even nudge your parents just a little more awake, and make them conscious for a moment of their own limited perspective.
I should emphasize that the point of studying in hiding is not to actually hide yourself from people, but just to train your inner self-teacher, like you'd train weights. I've come to see how important it is to be open and honest with people, because we live short lives and don't have time to squander our public lives in some shell-like mask. So, the studying in hiding exercise is just an exercise in self-teaching, and should not be used to foster some hidden life.
I had the "blessing" of going to a really bass-ackwards Christian high school for 9th grade, where they actually discouraged me from studying calculus. I actually had a calculus book confiscated by my math teacher, because she thought it was distracting me from the algebra class I was officially enrolled in! (None of the teachers at that school knew calculus) Having trained my mathemautodidact muscles in such a hostile environment, when I went on to junior college it seemed like a breeze by comparison.
STUDYING YOUR PASSIONS
You're probably already a a self-teacher, at least to a certain extent. Do you know lots of facts about your favorite TV show or movie or sports team? I assume you never took a class to learn about those. That means you're a self-teacher.
If you want to train your independent study muscles and become a superautodidact, try taking one of your passions and train it further. The real point isn't to become (say) a walking Toronto Bluejays encyclopedia, but just to train yourself to train yourself-- becoming a walking encyclopedia about one of your passions is just a way of doing that.
For example, maybe you're a big fan of the cartoon, King Of The Hill. Then you could practice autodidactism by reading through the King Of The Hill website, buying trivia books about the show, even researching the writers and voice actors. It's all pretty useless info in the big picture of things, but you'll be training your self-teaching muscles, through something you're passionate about and like studying.
SELF-TEACHING ON THE INTERNET
The internet makes self-teaching easier than it's ever been before, and it's getting easier and easier every day. Resources like Wikipedia are a godsend, and now there are forums and communities popping up around the most obscure things.
When I decided to teach myself Japanese, I had almost no idea how to start. At first, I was bumbling around pretty randomly, memorizing vocabulary lists (in useless romanized form), not even knowing what was important or not. I was trying to study Japanese like I studied Spanish in junior college, but Japanese is a much more difficult language than Spanish, in Spanish you can almost get by with just memorizing vocabulary which is conveniently written in the same Roman letters as English. But, I joined a Yahoo! group for people studying Japanese, and from there I was led to Tae Kim's Guide To Japanese Grammar, which put me solidly on the road to Japanese. From there I was even led to Khatzumoto's AJATT Site, which takes Japanese self-study and streamlines it and optimizes it and elitizes it so much it makes mainstream Japanese pedagogy seem like it's from the Dark Ages.
Without the internet, it would have been a lot harder to come as far as I have with Japanese. If my father had tried teach himself Japanese when he was my age, it would have been an almost insurmountable task, short of going and living in Japan.
BENEFITS OF BEING AN AUTODIDACT
If you become a strong self-educator, it will make school seem almost trivial, at least until you get up to graduate courses. I remember sitting in class, listening to the professor lecture about something or other, and thinking, Hey, this is right here in the textbook! I don't even need to be here!
To an autodidact, the class textbook is more than just the source from which exercises are assigned. It can actually be read, and what's more, assuming the textbook matches the course at least decently well, the whole course can be learned on one's own.
When you're an auto-didact, you see a little more clearly through the fake masks of social conditioning which tell us that we are what we do. I'm not an auto mechanic, but I know that if I really, really wanted to fix cars, and devoted all my time to it, I could be fixing cars within three months. I don't know a single thing about cars right now, but I know I could teach myself. Society says that I'm a math grad student and a calculus teacher. But I'm not limited to those fields by any means, I have freedom to learn and do whatever I want. Ten years from now I could be absolutely anything. Even medicine or law, don't intimidate me, I know that if I wanted to, I could pick them up.
And, the same goes for you. You also could start fixing cars within a few months, if you really wanted to, and if your inner self-teacher was in the driver's seat.
Not sure how to start being a self-teacher? First, pick something you'd like to learn about. Then, search the internet. Be willing to learn, and the answers will gradually reveal themselves to you.
OTHER ARTICLES ON AUTODIDACTISM:
Autodidact, PhD
You might be an autodidact if...
FURTHER READING
Skills And Metaskills A metaskill is a skill which involves other skills. Teaching yourself is an example of a metaskill, because it's an ability which lets you learn other abilities.
How To Be A Better Teacher I've found that by teaching others, I've actually gotten better at teaching myself as well. A pro 'didact should brush up on educator skills in general.
Training Self-Discipline Having good discipline and willpower is a great way to be a self-teacher.
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1 comments:
There is definitely a school of though that one can never really be taught anything particularly complicated. Like yourself I'm a (soon to be ex) mathematician and I would say that over 95% of everything I have ever learned mathematically has been due to sitting in a room by myself, but that is not to say that the hundreds of lectures I attended weren't important. They focussed my learning and gave me targets; and they were certainly targets I would not have set for myself.
Self study is vital to all learning, but being able to get advice from someone with more experience is also important; getting certain types of information in person is very valuable. Take language learning, sure you can sit in front of your SRS for months on end, but that knowledge only comes alive when you need it to interact with your environment, and so your environment becomes the teacher and a much more exciting one than you could construct solely by yourself.
Essentially I would say that really all you are saying in your article is that if you want to learn something don't expect it to be spoon fed to you, but you are going to have to put in some hard graft yourself. (by the way I don't think that you can self teach yourself to be a doctor, I hope not anyway)
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