Autodidacticism

Autodidacticism (also autodidactism) is self-education or self-directed learning. An autodidact is a mostly self-taught person, as opposed to learning in a school setting or from a full-time tutor or mentor.

Autodidacts might spend their time reading either in solitude or in public spaces such as at libraries or via educative websites. They may or may not have designed a plan for their course of study. They may or may not engage of network of experts for guidance.

The term "self-taught" is something of a journalistic trope these days, and is often used to signify "non-traditionally educated", which is entirely different, as the flow of information and the focus of study is usually governed by the teacher or educational source and not the student.

Inquiry into autodidacticism has implications for learning theory, educational research, educational philosophy, and educational psychology.

Allied disciplines

Autodidacticism is sometimes associated with skepticism and a wide range of independent-minded schools of thought. Ralph Dumain, when incorporating skepticism with irreligion and ethics, provides this list of allied disciplines: atheism, freethought, humanism, Ethical Culture, rationalism, agnosticism, skepticism, unbelief, secularism, and separation of church and state.

On its homepage, the Center for Inquiry states "Topics addressed include science, religion, philosophy, social issues, politics, atheism, humanism, agnosticism, skepticism, deism, evolution, morality and ethics, secularism, rationalism, psychology, and others."

The Brights movement has many goals along the lines of autodidacticism, as does the do it yourself movement and individualism as they address issues of political action.

Notable autodidacts

Occasionally, individuals have sought to excel in subjects outside the mainstream of conventional education:

• José Saramago Nobel Prize of Literature. His parents were unable to pay his studies at early age, and he was forced to abandon the baccalaureate. At the age of 13, he began to study mechanics to repair cars. He continued the next thirty years working as a locksmith for a metal company, and in an agency of social services. His first novel (Terra de pecado) was published in 1947 without any success at all. He stopped writing for publication, although he continued doing manuscripts for himself. At the end of the 60's, he joined the communist party, and after the fall of the fascist dictatorship in Portugal of 1974, he was the director of the nationalized newspaper Diario Noticias. Just a few years after the putsch of the left wing failed in 1975, he began to write again to survive. In that point of his life, the fame came. In 1998 he won the Nobel Prize for Literature.

• John von Neumann was famous for being the best mathematician of his time, yet even during his time at MIT, fellow students were occasionally (but regularly) shocked when von Neumann would have no idea about the material they were discussing. Because he was so self-educated, he had holes in the material which the more-formally-educated students had covered in their courses.

• Socrates, Descartes, Avicenna, Benjamin Franklin, George Bernard Shaw, Feodor Chaliapin, Abraham Lincoln, Ernest Hemingway, Thomas Alva Edison, Frederick Douglass, Malcolm X and Eric Hoffer were autodidacts. While Karl Popper did receive a college education, he never took courses in philosophy, and he did his initial work in the philosophy of science during the late 1920s and early 1930s while he was teaching science and math in high school. He then turned to the social sciences and attempted to transform them as well, again without any formal training or official mentoring. The best source for this story is Malachi Hacohen's book "Karl Popper: The Formative Years, 1902-1945". Also, Friedrich Nietzsche was a professor of classical philology, but was never formally trained in philosophy.

• The mystic and theologian Jakob Böhme was an autodidact. While being apprenticed to become a shoemaker, he read the Bible as well as the works of philosophers and theologians including Paracelsus, Caspar Schwenckfeld and Valentin Weigel, thereby educating himself without any formal schooling.

• The visionary artist and poet William Blake was an autodidact. He was initially educated by his mother prior to his enrollment in drawing classes and never received any formal schooling due to his rebellious temperament. Instead, he read widely on subjects of his own choosing.
• The cognitive scientist Walter Pitts of MIT was an autodidact. He taught himself mathematical logic, psychology, and neuroscience. He was one of the scientists who laid the foundations of cognitive sciences, artificial intelligence, and cybernetics.
• Forensic facial reconstruction artist Frank Bender is self-taught. His well-known forensic career started off with a day trip to a morgue, asked to try to put a face on the deceased, brought measurements home, created a successful facial reconstruction that led to his first (of many) IDs. He took only one semester of sculpture at the Academy of Fine Arts in Philadelphia.
• Mathematical genius Srinivasa Ramanujan and Newton's contemporary Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz were largely self-taught in mathematics, as was Oliver Heaviside. Ramanujan is notable as an autodidact for having developed thousands of new mathematical theorems despite having no formal education in mathematics.

• A number of famous British scientists in the nineteenth century taught themselves. The chemist and physicist Michael Faraday, the natural historians Alfred Russel Wallace (co-discoverer of natural selection) and Henry Walter Bates, "Darwin's Bulldog" Thomas Henry Huxley, the social philosopher Herbert Spencer.

• Jean-Paul Sartre's Nausea depicts an autodidact who is a self-deluding dilettante.

• Physicist and Judo expert Moshe Feldenkrais developed an autodidactic method of self-improvement based on his own experience with self-directed learning in physiology and neurology. He was motivated by his own crippling knee injury.
• Gerda Alexander, Heinrich Jacoby, and a number of other 20th century European innovators worked out methods of self-development that stressed intelligent sensitivity and awareness.

• John Boyd, fighter pilot and military strategist, was an accomplished autodidact who not only revolutionized fighter-aircraft design, but also developed new theories on learning and creativity.

• Mythologist Joseph Campbell exemplified the autodidactic method. Following completion of his masters degree, Campbell decided not to go forward with his plans to earn a doctorate, and he went into the woods in upstate New York, reading deeply for five years. According to poet and author Robert Bly, a friend of Campbell's, Campbell developed a systematic program of reading nine hours a day.

• The popular writer of science fiction, fantasy and children's books Terry Pratchett is quoted as saying "I didn't go to university. Didn't even finish A-levels. But I have sympathy for those who did".

• The musician Frank Zappa is noted for his exhortation, "Drop out of school before your mind rots from exposure to our mediocre educational system. Forget about the Senior Prom and go to the library and educate yourself if you've got any guts. Some of you like Pep rallies and plastic robots who tell you what to read."

• Mark Twain is known to have said: "I have never let my schooling interfere with my education."
• Playwright August Wilson dropped out of school in the ninth grade but continued to educate himself by spending long hours reading at Pittsburgh's Carnegie Library.

• Arnold Schoenberg called himself an 'autodidact' in an interview. Other largely self-taught composers include notably Danny Elfman, Nobuo Uematsu, Joachim Raff, Georg Philipp Telemann and Edward Elgar.

• Several notable people considered to have an inspirational religious message have been autodidacts: for instance John Bunyan, George Fox and Rodney "Gypsy" Smith.

• Many successful filmmakers did not attend college or dropped out. These include James Cameron, Steven Spielberg, Quentin Tarantino, Robert Rodriguez, Paul Thomas Anderson, David Fincher, Stanley Kubrick, John Huston, Woody Allen, Steven Soderbergh, and Dario Argento.

• Penn Jillette, a member of the comedy and magic duo Penn & Teller, declared both he and his partner Teller to be autodidacts in an episode of their television series, Penn & Teller: Bullshit!.

• Vincent J. Schaefer, who discovered the principle of cloud seeding, was schooled to 10th grade when asked by parents to help with family income. He continued his informal education by reading, participation in free lectures by scientists and exploring nature through year-round outdoor activity.

• Modern Pashto poet Ameer Hamza Shinwari though not educated in the regular manner, was able to establish his career through self-education.

• Robert Lewis Shayon, early radio producer, author, television critic for Christian Science Monitor and The Saturday Review, and Ivy League professor, never had a college education.

• David Bowie, singer, musician, multi-instrumentalist, actor and painter, has never trained in any of the mentioned fields and only received a few singing lessons in the 1960s (as reported by his former manager, Ken Pitt). As a teenager he took some lessons on saxophone by Ronnie Ross. All other instruments (including piano, keyboards/synths, electric/acoustic guitar, harmonica, koto, limited bass and percussion), he taught himself. His paintings and sculptures were created (and exhibited) without any formal art school training. He took a few lessons in movement and dance with the Lindsey Kemps Dance company but trained himself in mime.

• Kató Lomb, one of first simultaneous interpreters of the world, spoke more than ten languages fluently and she learnt them by gleaning their rules and vocabulary from books (mostly novels), as she described in her book Polyglot: How I Learn Languages (2008), originally published in Hungarian in four editions (1970, 1972, 1990, 1995).

• Buckminster Fuller, a self-proclaimed comprehensive anticipatory design scientist, was twice expelled from Harvard and, after a life-altering experience while on the edge of suicide, dedicated his life to working in the service of humanity and thinking for himself. In the process he created many new terms such as "ephemeralization," "dymaxion," and "Spaceship Earth."

• Nazeer Naji, a top Pakistani Urdu news columnist and intellectual best known for his progressive writings has never attended any formal school because of the abject poverty of his parents. He has been in the journalism for 50 years, started many popular magazines including Akhbar-e-Jehan and also served as the speech writer for the former Pakistani Prime Minister Nzawaz Sharif.

• Muhammed Suiçmez, guitarist and vocalist for German Death Metal band Necrophagist is a self-proclaimed autodidact. Muhammed, a virtuoso guitarist taught himself guitar from age 15 secretly behind his parents back, citing other virtuosi such as Yngwie Malmsteen as prime inspiration. He also taught himself drums, bass and other musically related skills so that he could record his first album Onset Of Putrefaction (1999) for which he played all instruments for.

Autodidactism in fiction

The earliest novels to deal with the concept of autodidacticism were the Arabic novels, Philosophus Autodidactus, written by Ibn Tufail in 12th-century Islamic Spain, and Theologus Autodidactus, written by Ibn al-Nafis in 13th-century Egypt. Both deal with autodidactic feral children living in isolation from society on a desert island and discovering the truth as they grow up without having been in contact with other human beings.

In The Ignorant Schoolmaster, Jacques Rancière describes the emancipatory education of Joseph Jacotot, a post-Revolutionary philosopher of education who discovered that he could teach things he did not know. The book is both a history and a contemporary intervention in the philosophy and politics of education, through the concept of autodidactism; Rancière chronicles Jacotot's "adventures", but he articulates Jacotot's theory of "emancipation" and "stultification" in the present tense.

The 1997 drama film Good Will Hunting follows the story of autodidact Will Hunting, played by Matt Damon. Will demonstrates his breadth and depth of knowledge throughout the film, but especially to his therapist and in a heated discussion in a Harvard bar.

One of the main characters in The Elegance of the Hedgehog by Muriel Barbery, is a autodidact. The story is told from the view point of Renee, a middle aged autodidact concierge in a Paris upscale apartment house and Paloma, a 12 year old daughter of one of the tenants who is unhappy with her life. These two people find they have much in common when they both befriend a new tenant, Mr. Ozu and their lives change forever.

See also

• Critical pedagogy
• Philosophus Autodidactus
• Theologus Autodidactus
• Invisible College
• Jacques Rancière
• John Taylor Gatto
• Unschooling

Further reading

• Brown, Resa Steindel. The Call to Brilliance: A True Story to Inspire Parents and Educators. ISBN 0-9778369-0-8.
• Cameron, Brent and Meyer, Barbara. SelfDesign: Nurturing Genius Through Natural Learning. ISBN 1-59181-044-2.
• Hayes, Charles D. Self-University: The Price of Tuition Is the Desire to Learn. Your Degree Is a Better Life. ISBN 0-9621979-0-4.
• Hayes, Charles The Rapture of Maturity: A Legacy of Lifelong Learning. ISBN 09621979-4-7.
• Hailey, Kendall. The Day I Became an Autodidact. ISBN 0-385-29636-3.
• Llewellyn, Grace. The Teenage Liberation Handbook: How to Quit School and Get a Real Life and Education. ISBN 0-9629591-7-0.
• Rancière, Jacques. The Ignorant Schoolmaster: Five Lessons in Intellectual Emancipation. Stanford Univ. Press, 1991. ISBN 0-8047-1969-1.
• Solomon, Joan. The Passion to Learn: An Inquiry into Autodidactism. ISBN 0-415-30418-0.

External links

• Autodidactproject.org
• MIT OpenCourseWare
• Independent Collegiate Study Free Open University
• Email community for autodidacts