this post was submitted on 01 Feb 2024
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Autodidact
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I've been thinking about this idea of self-teaching for many decades, because I like nothing more than learning new things beyond the "Trivial Pursuit" level.
In general, I think what is most missing on the journey is curriculum and lesson plans. The texts and reference materials have never been easier to access, although they've never been very hard to access. The real challenges are closely related:
Setting concrete and practical objectives, identifying relevant prerequisites, and structuring the whole into a coherent plan with each step connected to and building on the previous while simultaneously laying the foundations for the next is one challenge.
Much harder in many ways is the development of evaluations for adequately assessing the current state of knowledge and skill in a way that points the way to remedial work.
Having the discipline to then fully engage with and follow that plan, being careful to not skip steps or move to the next step before achieving sufficient mastery of the current one. Then to engage with remedial materials to shore up weaknesses.
In combination, this is why even merely adequate classrooms are typically superior to living rooms and shops. And I say this as someone who is primarily self-taught as a programmer.
What I would like to see more of is materials accessible to the layperson to help them develop curricula, lesson plans, and evaluations. Better yet would be direct access to existing curricula, lesson plans, and evaluations. For me, it was a hard won lesson to discover that my biggest obstacle to learning something on my own was the tendency to not start at the very beginning.
I absolutely agree, and unfortunately in my experience I ran into this as much in my formal education as my informal education. Not to knock my formal education, as I wasn't a great student in some ways and I think my curiosity was at times more intense than necessarily suited it, yet I found some of my troubles learning were that even formal education seems to struggle with determining where and how to start.
Take a classic example of a subject students struggle with like mathematics. For some students the issue is a matter of relating it to anything practical/real-world, however I also suspect for others the issue is both that and trying to grasp, without always knowing how to articulate it, the logical fundamentals that support and validate it. For many students it may be sufficient to begin with the basics of counting, adding, subtracting, and so on, but if you don't ground it both intellectually and practically, it's no surprise the further some students go the more difficulty they have finding it of any relevance.
It's similar with the subject of language imo. The practical part perhaps not as much, but establishing a foundation for why/how certain linguistic elements emerge and are arranged as they are, as well as how they continue to change, would I think better serve students along their start than a hollow, "This is just how it is" sort of approach that one may encounter in some early education/learning. Although perhaps I'm a very specific minority in this case, and some of the intellectual rationale for different subjects may be overkill for many to help them get going.
That is a great example of why it's so important to identify the true beginning for your starting point. My son was struggling with early math (grade 2) and the teacher was quite concerned. I spent 2 weeks working the number line with him (something the teacher seemed to have never heard of) and he was caught right up.
Over the course of the next couple of months, my son discovered (with guidance, of course) what happens if you extend the number line below zero, then add other number lines in other dimensions, to get multiplication, squares and cubes and their roots. He even gained an awareness that it was abstractly or conceptually possible to go beyond 3 dimensions, even if they can't be directly experienced. He never again struggled with any math.
The teacher was livid, by the way, because instead of requiring additional attention as a result of falling behind, he was requiring additional attention because he had raced ahead. :)