Are you an autodidact?
Autodidact(n).
a person who has learned a subject without the benefit of a teacher or formal education; a self-taught person.
This odd sounding term refers to a style of learning that in my view is largely under-appreciated in modern society.
Self-learning or autodidactism is simply the act of finding information for ourselves, and understanding it without the help of others. With the abundance of resources in libraries and the internet, this should be easy to do.
Many of us stop learning after formal education is complete. While I think there are a few reasons for this, I think learned dependency is a factor. The modern system of education de-emphasizes self-directed learning in favor of a top-down passive style of learning. Unless people have had experiences otherwise, it becomes easy to see why some people believe they need to go to school to learn anything.
A fear of change is also a factor. Most people become averse to change in their mid 20s to 30s. It's not surprising that many people stop learning around the same age.
Learning takes effort. It's tempting to think "finally, I know enough to do well in this world". But the person that reaches that point is the person that starts to fight all change, whether for good or bad.
As I've said before, everything changes. Our environment changes, our responsibilities change, our available resources change, even our needs and wants change over time. All these changes require us to have new knowledge to adapt and benefit.
We need things to change. Perhaps from historical perspective we are doing slightly better than several hundred years ago, but we are still far from an idyllic society. Horrible things still happen, and as ethical people we should try and make things better.
I believe most people want to make things better, but don't feel they can do enough to make change. However little changes can have an effect I call the moral multiplier. Essentially, the moral multiplier means that a little change in an individuals behavior carries on to others and creates an effect much larger than the original action itself.
The point of all that is, we need to encourage behavior that adapts to change. And a very important way to do that is self-learning.
Autodidactism or self-learning is an independent form of learning. The gaining of new knowledge by ones self is empowering and teaches people to be independent. It also allows us to feel more powerful against the forces of change.
This is important. It's the direct counter attack to a society of fear. I sometimes think that many of the Hollywood movies we have depicting heroes, villains and forces larger than life would disappear if so many of us didn't feel so small.
Sugata Mitra has conducted some amazing experiments over the past 10 years to show what children are capable of learning when given the right environment.
To me it shows the power of self-learning. A quote from the video clip is "when children are interested, learning happens". I think we are all like this. We all have our passions and interests within us. As we get older they don't die, we just start telling ourselves they aren't important. Or we don't have time. Or something.
But like other forms of informal learning, it empowers us. It makes us passionate. It helps us embrace change when it is good. It allows us to benefit from change. It helps with all these things and by extension, everyone else. Because if you change your behavior, so will some others around you, and so will some of those around them, and so on.
Our job is just to do our part to make a better world. And committing effort to understanding our world is an important way to do that.
