Are You an Autodidact?

The hobbling Polyphemos with the charming poise shall lead the legless and the blind prematurely to their inevitable demise at the base of the Lemming-cliff. Splat.

Schools are an astonishing achievement of modern man. The intended purpose of these institutions is to serve us as educational, social, and cultural hubs: eclectic, cooperative monuments to the power and progress of the human mind and the collective hive mind called society that human minds make up. But, as anyone who has ever attended one of these institutions knows: they’re not all they’re cracked up to be.

Arbitrary homework, watered-down coursework, lack of hands-on demonstration, avoidable ideological bias from teachers, memorization-based testing (as opposed to knowledge-based testing), ridiculous tuition costs, and unnecessary prerequisites: it’s all there. Should a young engineering major really have to spend two years taking things like Pottery and Racism-Is-Bad-In-Case-You-Didn’t-Know 101 while juggling a job at McDonalds and a social life in order to be qualified to get a low-tier engineering job that they, had they any real passion for engineering before they began attending college, were probably qualified to perform in terms of real world skills? Why pay so much to have a teacher waste ten minutes getting their shit together, twenty minutes masturbating their intellect, another twenty minutes playing show-and-tell with a textbook you already have, and ten minutes telling you what you need to study in said textbook for three hours when you get home? Shit, why not just buy the textbook and try to read and understand it yourself in your free time?

Oh, wait. There are people who do that. They’re a philosophical minority called autodidacts, and in all their unconventional, uncertified, independent majesty, they trek the streets of a country where the contents of an inflated résumé or a degree are often viewed as more important than the contents of one’s mind, all the while attempting to gain knowledge for the sake of knowledge… and, get this, they sometimes succeed!

As someone who is currently eighteen years old, unemployed, not in college, and trying to start a career in freelance writing: autodidacticism is a part of my everyday existence. With any given article I write, whether I end up publishing it or not, I end up learning new words, new ideas, new concepts; I expand my intellectual arsenal, and thus, what I am able to contribute to the world. And trust me, I aspire to be more than a couch philosopher.

For the longest time, autodidacts were primarily “street-smart” people and library junkies: but now it seems that the Internet, due to its endless collection of free information (both legal and illegal in nature) has become their home. With a little bit of searching on torrent networks, one can find large zip files containing scanned copies of school textbooks for free. Be wary of course, as this is illegal in some cases, and I’m not suggesting that you do it at all. The oath of the autodidact is “Knowledge for the sake of knowledge”, and that’s what I’m giving you. *Wink*

Autodidacticism does not work for everyone. If you’re the kind of person who would rather be lead to a societal niche by a template system than have to innovate a fast-paced education for yourself, AND you have the money, too: go to school. Autodidacticism also requires an intense amount of patience: a different kind of patience than what formal education requires.

How do you know if you’re an autodidact? Just ask yourself these questions:
Am I disillusioned by formal education due to…
• Arbitrariness?
• Slow pace?
• “Watered-down” content?
• An inflexible schedule?
• Biased teachers?
• Tuition costs?
• Cramming- and quota-based curriculums?
If you answered “Yes” to any one of these, chances are you might just be autodidact material. If this has you worried for any reason, don’t feel bad. You’re in good company. So is Benjamin Franklin, Earnest Hemingway, Tom Cruise, Stanley Kubrick, Quentin Tarantino, Steven Spielberg, Mark Twain, The Wright Brothers, Frank Lloyd Wright, Ted Turner, Bill Gates, Malcolm X, Robert Frost, Albert Einstein, Frank Zappa, Henry Ford, F. Scott Fitzgerald, William Faulkner, and countless others. Join the club and start teaching yourself today.

"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." - Frank Zappa

“I never let schooling get in the way of my education.” – Mark Twain

“It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education” – Albert Einstein

“I consider myself one of a number of those who write as they learn and learn as they write.” – St. Augustine of Hippo