Autodidacticism

"Autodidact" redirects here. For the 1997 rock album, see Autodidact (album).

"Self-taught" redirects here. For the hip hop group, see Self Taught.

"Self-taught learner" redirects here. For the 2009 pop rock album, see Self-Taught Learner.

"Self-teachings" redirects here. For teachings about the self, see Self.

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.

A person may become an autodidact at nearly any point in his or her life. While some may have been educated in a conventional manner in a particular field, they may choose to educate themselves in other, often unrelated areas.

Self-teaching and self-directed learning are not necessarily lonely processes. Some autodidacts spend a great deal of time in libraries or on educational websites. Many, according to their plan for learning, avail themselves of instruction from family members, friends, or other associates, although strictly speaking this might not be considered autodidactic, unless the emphasis is placed on collecting specific information as opposed to being guided in a general course of study by a teacher figure.

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 its focus 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.

Autodidactism in literature and 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.

The working-class protagonist of Jack London's Martin Eden (1909) embarks on a path of self-learning in order to gain the affections of Ruth, a member of cultured society. By the end of the novel, Eden has surpassed the intellect of the bourgeois class, leading him to a state of indifference and ultimately, suicide.

Jean-Paul Sartre's Nausea (1938) depicts an autodidact who is a self-deluding dilettante.

In The Ignorant Schoolmaster (1987), 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 autodidacticism; 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. Hunting demonstrates his breadth and depth of knowledge throughout the film, but especially to his therapist and in a heated discussion in a Harvard bar.

On the television show Criminal Minds (2005–present), Supervisory Special Agent Dr. Spencer Reid is an autodidact with an eidetic memory, meaning that he can remember and easily recall almost everything he sees (this, however, only applies to visual information). He holds doctoral degrees in mathematics, chemistry, and engineering. He also holds bachelor degrees in sociology and psychology, and is working on completing another in philosophy. He is known on the show for being a genius; he has an IQ of 187 and is certainly the smartest member of the FBI's Behavioral Analysis Unit stationed at Quantico, Virginia. Most of his autodidacticism comes from reading books, which he prefers over traditional forms of education, including schooling. He reads at a rate of 20,000 words per minute.

One of the main characters in The Elegance of the Hedgehog (2006), by Muriel Barbery, is an 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.

In the Hindu epic, the Mahabharata, Ekalavya is depicted as a tribal boy who was denied education in the science of arms from royal teachers from the house of Kuru. Ekalavya went to the forest, where he taught himself archery in front of an image of the Kuru teacher, Drona, that he had built for himself. Later, when the royal family found that Ekalavya had practiced with the image of Drona as his teacher, Drona asked for Ekalavya's thumb as part of his tuition. Ekalavya complied with Drona's request, thus ending his martial career.

Notable autodidacts

Artists and authors

• Leonardo da Vinci was an Italian polymath: painter, sculptor, architect, musician, scientist, mathematician, engineer, inventor, anatomist, geologist, botanist, writer and arguably one of the greatest autodidacts who ever lived. However, Da Vinci was not autodidactic in his study of the arts, as he was trained through the Guild system, just as other Renaissance artists had been.

• 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 '60s, 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.

• 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.

• John Clare was self-taught and rose out of poverty to become an acclaimed poet.

• 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.

• 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 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 Nawaz Sharif.

• Feodor Chaliapin

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

Actors, musicians, and other entertainers

• The 20th century virtuoso pianist Claudio Arrau was highly regarded as an intellectual despite his lack of formal education outside of his musical training. Arrau spoke five languages, four of which he learned on his own in addition to his native Spanish: English, German, French, and Italian.

• The musician Frank Zappa was 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."

• 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.

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

• TV's Craig Ferguson, host of The Late Late Show with Craig Ferguson on CBS, who first rose to fame in America as Nigel Wick on The Drew Carey Show, quit high school in native Scotland at the minimum legal age to do so, 16. He continued his education, "haphazard and informal", through American, European and Russian literature, and in his autobiography, "American on Purpose", identifies himself as an autodidact—although a dilettante one (see Sartre's Nausea, above).

• 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!.

• Christopher Hughes, the winner of Mastermind, International Mastermind, Brain of Britain, and a current member of crack TV quiz team the Eggheads is almost entirely self educated. After leaving Enfield Grammar School at 15 he spent all his life working on the railways in the capacity of driver or station master. He is one of only four people ever to have won both Mastermind and Brain of Britain.. On a couple of occasions on "Eggheads" he has referred to himself as "The Autodidact's Autodidact".

• 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.

• Alan Moore creator of the comics, "V for Vendetta" and "Watchmen."

• Charles G. Dawes, was a self-taught pianist and composer and a member of Phi Mu Alpha Sinfonia, the national fraternity for men in music. His 1912 composition, "Melody in A Major," became a well-known piano and violin piece, and was played at many official functions as his signature tune. It was transformed into the pop song, "It's All In The Game", in 1951 when Carl Sigman added lyrics.

• Niccolò Paganini, was a self-taught violinist and composer.

• George Bernard Shaw

• Ernest Hemingway

• Errol Flynn

• Russell Brand - Self-proclaimed autodidact

Scientists, historians, and educators

• Michael Faraday, the chemist and physicist. Although Faraday received little formal education and knew little of higher mathematics, such as calculus, he was one of the most influential scientists in history. Some historians of science refer to him as the best experimentalist in the history of science.

• 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.

• 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. Nathaniel Bowditch was a colonial period American mathematician who wrote the American Practical Navigator.

• 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.

• The natural historians Alfred Russel Wallace (co-discoverer of natural selection) and Henry Walter Bates both 19th-century British scientists.

• "Darwin's Bulldog" Thomas Henry Huxley, a 19th-century British scientist.

• The social philosopher Herbert Spencer, a 19th century British scientist.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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".

• Jane Jacobs wrote books about city planning, economics, and sociology with only a high school degree and training in journalism and sternography, plus courses at Columbia University's extension school.

• 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".

• Benjamin Franklin

• Socrates

• Descartes

• Avicenna

• Thomas Alva Edison

• Eric Hoffer

• William Kamkwamba, inventor

• George Green, mathematician and physicist

• Robert Franklin, ornithologist while imprisoned

Others

• Kató Lomb, one of first simultaneous interpreters in the world, spoke more than ten languages fluently and she learned 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).

• 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.

• Professional skateboarder and entrepreneur Rodney Mullen established his reputation in the sport of freestyle skateboarding at a young age with new tricks and routines developed largely in isolation on his family's farm in Florida. His autodidactism led to significant and long-standing innovations in skateboarding, such as the flatground ollie and the kickflip, both staples of modern skateboarding.

• Frederick Douglassan American abolitionist, women's suffragist, editor, orator, author, statesman, minister and reformer. He was one of the most renowned figures in African-American, and United-States history.

• Malcolm X, an African-American Muslim minister, public speaker, and human rights activist, taught himself about subjects from genetics to sociology to philosophy. He also copied a dictionary word-for-word while in prison for 7 years, thus expanding his vocabulary himself.

• Wikileaks founder Julian Assange was kept from school by his mother who thought it would "inculcate an unhealthy respect for authority in her children and dampen their will to learn."

• Abraham Lincoln Self-educated Lawyer/Politician and Former American President

• Heston Blumenthal Chef, author and TV presenter

See also

• Unschooling
• John Taylor Gatto
• Jacques Rancière
• Christopher Langan
• Critical pedagogy
• E-learning
• Philosophus Autodidactus
• Theologus Autodidactus
• Do it yourself
• Jacque Fresco

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 0-9621979-4-7.
• 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