What Self-education Means to Me | Diary of an Autodidact

One person I subscribe to on YouTube is Lady of the Library. Cinzia is in the process of getting her PhD, and regularly posts encouraging videos about education and literature, as well as video essays on many current topics. I’ve loved viewing her videos on becoming an independent scholar and her tips on self-education. It’s encouraged me to branch out of my tiny bubble to look for topics and form thoughts that I never would’ve otherwise considered.

While I don’t quite have the incentive to delve into becoming a scholar on any topic, I’ve become open to the idea of picking topics that have always interested me and digging into them more. There is something strangely liberating about learning without the expectation of becoming an expert.

Formal education comes with an obvious destination. There is a syllabus, a reading list, tests, and eventually some sort of credential at the end of it. Even when the subject itself is fascinating, there is an underlying pressure to transform knowledge into something measurable: a grade, a degree, a career, or a qualification. Independent learning removes much of that structure. There is no professor waiting for a paper, no examination determining whether I understood the material, and no particular reason I have to stop researching when the semester ends.

Don’t get me started on financial freedoms, as well. 

At first, I thought this lack of structure would make learning less meaningful. Instead, I’m beginning to wonder if and how it can make learning more personal.

The idea of the autodidact has existed long before the internet made it possible to access an almost absurd quantity of information from a laptop. Historically, self-directed learners have had to be remarkably resourceful. Libraries, regular correspondence with others in the field of study, private study, lectures, and personal collections could all serve as substitutes for formal instruction. Today, the problem is almost the opposite. Information is no longer scarce. It is overwhelming, to say the least.

Again, those damn phones!

I can learn about medieval literature before breakfast, listen to a lecture on a new discovery in psychology over lunch, and end the evening reading an academic paper about monsters in Victorian fiction. The difficulty is no longer finding something to learn, but in deciding what is worth learning (and then resisting the temptation to abandon it for the next interesting thing).

There is a difference between knowing things and studying something. The former can happen accidentally, but the latter requires attention. It means studying an idea long enough to become comfortable with changing my perception of it. It means encountering an argument I disagree with and trying to understand it rather than simply dismissing it (even if I still end up not agreeing). It means following sources back to their sources, recognizing the difference between evidence and someone’s interpretation of a thought or idea, and occasionally admitting that the answer I wanted is not the answer the evidence supports.

That is what appeals to me about the idea of self-education and the studying that comes with it. I don’t want to spend hours of my life and thousands of dollars getting a degree in a topic, and I don’t even know that I want to become an authority on anything. I simply like the idea of taking my own curiosity seriously and seeing where I turn up at the end of it.

I think there is something valuable in that kind of learning. In a culture that encourages us to turn every interest into a side hustle and every hobby into a skill, there is something rebellious about learning something simply because it fascinates me.

So I won’t become a scholar in the traditional sense, but I like the idea of borrowing their habits and seeing where curiosity takes me.

I can read beyond the first page of Google results. I can find the books, the papers, the historians, the literary critics, and the arguments that disagree with one another. I can keep notes. I can ask better questions. I can change my mind.

And what’s best about it, is I don’t have to do any of these things at all. I have no teacher or mentor telling me what I must and mustn’t do, I can take my time, and I can change topics at the drop of a hat if I like! I make it for myself, and people can try to criticize it but there is really no use of it. 

Now that I’ve explained to you what being an autodidact means to me, and what that means for my personal studies, I need to make a list of topics I want to explore, and maybe figure out one that I want to focus on right now. I’ve become very interested in the last two years on “creature features” and recently discovered the topic of Monster Theory, so that is something I’ve been slowly gazing at. 

Whatever the case, whatever your circumstance, please share with me topics that you’ve recently become curious about!