Possibilities in an Autodidactic Future by Charles D. Hayes
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Imagine what would happen if we as a nation were to spend a third of our current education budget for the simple but direct purpose of enabling anyone who wanted to learn anything to do so: anytime, anyplace, without qualification. To be an autodidact is to behave as if such a system is already in place. The means are there, if you really thirst for knowledge. You can learn anything when you begin to think of an education not as something you get but as something you take. This is a very simple sounding premise, but it flies in the face of traditional education. Furthermore, you don’t have to pay a fortune to acquire learning unless that’s the way you prefer to do it. From the multiplication tables to quantum mechanics, if your desire to learn is strong enough, you can find a way to quench your thirst for knowledge. Einstein didn’t come up with the theory of relativity in a classroom.
Compulsory schooling, whose purpose is to outlaw ignorance, seems instead to have certified it on a grand scale. The anti-intellectual attitudes of millions of so-called educated people serve as living proof. More to be pitied than those who have fallen through the "educational" cracks are those who have been intellectually lobotomized in the name of learning. Marking time in lives of stultifying mediocrity, with no strong interests in much of anything, they put up with jobs they hate and pretend to enjoy the mindless entertainment they pursue to compensate. Holding elitist status in material possessions, and having far more wealth than eighty percent of the human beings on this planet, such people nevertheless complain about how poorly the world treats them. On nearing the end of their lives, those who have viewed their existence as barely tolerable drudgery begin to panic at the realization that they have never learned to truly think for themselves nor felt the exhilaration of intellectual engagement. Would that all human beings could experience throughout their lives the plain, ordinary wonder of existence that comes through active curiosity.
Entertainment today is a cheap substitute for the thrill of intellectual pursuit. Just a few metaphorical feet above popular culture lies a jet stream of ideas shaped by the geniuses of our species: a legacy of ideas by philosophers, great literature by authors expressing the essence of the human condition and a historical record of how their actions squared with their theories. This is anything but an ivory tower. The great book advocates Robert Hutchins and Mortimer Adler called it the Great Conversation and it is accessible to all who seek it. If you are poor and lack fine clothing, you still can try on elegant garments in a department store. Similarly, if you can’t afford a nice car, you still can sit in one at a dealer’s showroom. But, no matter what your situation if you have a thirst for knowledge, you can enter the great conversation of humankind. You can try on the ideas of the greatest thinkers who have ever lived, take them home, and keep them with you forever.
It is foolish to assume that economically and politically marginalized individuals can and will en-masse develop a thirst for knowledge without some kind of liberation. Brazilian educator Paulo Freire argues that "freedom is acquired by conquest, not by gift." In Pedagogy of the Oppressed, Freire tells us, "One of the gravest obstacles to the achievement of liberation is that oppressive reality absorbs those within it and thereby acts to submerge human beings’ consciousness." Thus participation in the great conversation becomes a critical condition for obtaining the kind of political power that leads to deep understanding and thus liberation. A thirst for knowledge is, in part, a product of a radicalized awareness of one’s being in the world. Expanded awareness is an integral component of self-direction and is an antidote to both indoctrination and intellectual and economic poverty.
Self-directed learning is often characterized as being anti-cooperative, and yet a group of people with an insatiable curiosity and burning desire to know are as eager to cooperate as anyone you will find. Enthusiasm for learning is contagious. Still, it is a mistake to think of learning and the knowledge it provides as a possession. Learning is effectively a position or, better yet, a positioning device. The learning we achieve as individuals serves as an invisible university in which our understanding of the world grows and envelops new territory accommodating new ideas and tolerance for people and cultures who see the world differently than we do. This acquired knowledge doesn’t rid us of the anxiety and despair that are part and parcel of the human condition, but it places us in a much better posture to cope with it.
Near the limit of our understanding is a wall, or an abyss, if you will, that shields us from our greatest fears and prejudices. Increased knowledge and understanding expand the distance between the wall and ourselves. It gives us room to breathe. Room for toleration. We are less threatened by those we don’t understand. Simply stated, we have room not to hate. Thus, a liberal education enhances the social sphere, even if the connection is not so readily observable. In spite of all of the distress brought about by the velocity of the changing times we are living in, the sheer diversity and profundity of differing viewpoints offer the most hope for achieving a more critical consciousness among individuals and throughout society. This is true because, for the first time in history, the social creation of reality is happening in plain sight, and everyone who is willing to look can see it.
To be a participant in the great conversation is not the same as using knowledge as canned goods for a particular purpose--to justify your own status or position or that of your clan. Partaking in the great conversation is a setting aside of absolutes while you search. By nature the great conversation is unsettled business supporting the notion that life is a journey and not a destination. Historian Daniel Boorstin puts this in perspective when he says, "It is not skeptics or explorers but fanatics and ideologues who menace decency and progress. No agnostic ever burned anyone at the stake or tortured a pagan a heretic or an unbeliever."
In the lives of human beings, ideas matter. To be knowledgeable of many great ideas is to increase the size of one’s perceptional horizon. It creates a stage big enough to live a meaningful life. It doesn’t mean that you can’t find precise answers to specific questions or that you can’t find the particular knowledge you seek. It means simply that the conversation, by definition, never is over. Ideas that seem to have suffered the deathblow of a knock-down argument have a way of resurfacing with new relevance. The philosopher Immanuel Kant is buried often, but he still lives.
Wealth and resources aside, no culture, country or community has a privileged lock on reality. None can say with absolute confidence that this is the path the rest must take. None can say that theirs is the economic system, religion, worldview, or philosophy that humankind must accept without discourse. Indeed, it is because of the nature of socially constructed reality that awareness and dialog, whether real or imagined, are so important. For it is only through increased understanding and awareness of the fabric of social reality that we are able to determine the temper and mettle of injustice. Through such inquiry we come to realize the wisdom of Paulo Freire’s insight that only power which is sustained through the comprehension of those who are themselves oppressed has the substance for genuine liberation. All other attempts invite what Freire calls false generosity. Does anyone doubt that slavery never would have been overthrown if the argument had not been about anything more than improving conditions for slaves? Or that slave masters never would have been moved sufficiently by dissonance to change the system had not the slaves understood the injustice first?
An autodidactic philosophy has a better chance to create a community dedicated to lifelong learning because, by nature, it keeps the conversation going without spoon-fed dogma and canned polemics. An educational process overly dependent on the consumption of predigested content quashes critical consciousness. A society with an autodidactic educational philosophy is the final requisite for a mature, viable democracy. Indeed, a society of individuals who take it upon themselves to see to their own intellectual development sets the very foundation for democracy through the actions of those citizens’ everyday lives. It is a dynamic community because it is made up of people who are living their lives as if they are really interested in them. Without such involvement, we are doomed to live lives void of authenticity--lives the French philosopher Jean Paul Sartre would have said demonstrate bad faith.
We seem to have a tendency to hate and despise those who question our version of truth and who threaten to burst our perceptional bubble of reality. This dissonance, however, is the very stuff that drives the conversation. Removed though we might be from the great ideas of the humanities, each of us in our own individual lives has a storehouse of real life experience to compare with the grand theories about the world. When you contrast your experience with theory, then you have something to add to the conversation. People who can’t sustain an argument about community without withdrawing into factions of us against them do not in fact have a community. Make no mistake, knowledge does not make one person better than another. Knowledge does not make me better than you; it is capable only of making me a better me. Moreover, the only hope we have as individuals that others will share our worldview rests in our willingness to live and thus teach by example we leave as evidence that our way is worthy of emulation. Autodidactism itself guarantees nothing but greater participation in one’s own education and openness to a sense of reality uncontaminated by dogma.
The digital world we expect the third millennium to produce is itself not a panacea for the frailties of human culture and yet it offers unparalleled mechanisms not only for keeping the great conversation going but also for making it richer in dimension and diversity than ever before in the history of humankind. Throughout the world, barriers to information are breaking down as privilege gives way to access. More and more the responsibility for learning resides with the learner. Imagine what kind of a learning community we might achieve if we could find both public and private support for creating the learning environment equivalent of a system that assumed the role of Socrates while each of us took the part of a Plato. This is not at all a farfetched idea. It is one that will increasingly arise, if we simply behave autodidactically.
As a community we face a challenge on two fronts: the first is to awaken those who were put to sleep in an attempt to educate them, and the second is to reach those who have been ignored altogether. We must use persuasion instead of force, discourse instead of instruction, and a sense of enthusiasm and adventure over reproach. As learning communities we must connect the library both metaphorically and practically in an interactive fashion to bring together those who seek knowledge with those who have wisdom and the enthusiasm to inspire. As communities we must make a compelling, visible case for literacy in all segments of the population. Being literate should be seen as so desirable that to be illiterate and not to seek help is unthinkable. Our case will become legitimate and believable largely through our demonstrated willingness to make available the resources every person needs for learning: anything, anytime, anywhere and at any pace without stigma.
Most of us who are adults today, even those of us who are strong proponents of self-education, grew up with the predominant psychology that an education is something you get. For us, an education as something you take is an expectation that we can clearly pass on to our children and grandchildren. And we can support efforts to promote a learning community whose thrust is supportive of educational autonomy. An autodidactic future is one where the same autonomy that enables individuals to develop their own interests also predisposes them to continuing and participating in the great conversation of our time. The possibilities of such a society are breathtaking.
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© Copyright 2000. Charles D. Hayes - All Rights Reserved.
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