Autodidacticism Quotes

“Every person has two educations, one which he receives from others, and one, more important, which he gives to himself.”
― Edward Gibbon

“Owing to the shape of a bell curve, the education system is geared to the mean. Unfortunately, that kind of education is virtually calculated to bore and alienate gifted minds. But instead of making exceptions where it would do the most good, the educational bureaucracy often prefers not to be bothered.

In my case, for example, much of the schooling to which I was subjected was probably worse than nothing. It consisted not of real education, but of repetition and oppressive socialization (entirely superfluous given the dose of oppression I was getting away from school). Had I been left alone, preferably with access to a good library and a minimal amount of high-quality instruction, I would at least have been free to learn without useless distractions and gratuitous indoctrination. But alas, no such luck.

Let’s try to break the problem down a bit. The education system […] is committed to a warm and fuzzy but scientifically counterfactual form of egalitarianism which attributes all intellectual differences to environmental factors rather than biology, implying that the so-called 'gifted' are just pampered brats who, unless their parents can afford private schooling, should atone for their undeserved good fortune by staying behind and enriching the classroom environments of less privileged students.

This approach may appear admirable, but its effects on our educational and intellectual standards, and all that depends on them, have already proven to be overwhelmingly negative. This clearly betrays an ulterior motive, suggesting that it has more to do with social engineering than education. There is an obvious difference between saying that poor students have all of the human dignity and basic rights of better students, and saying that there are no inherent educationally and socially relevant differences among students. The first statement makes sense, while the second does not.

The gifted population accounts for a very large part of the world’s intellectual resources. As such, they can obviously be put to better use than smoothing the ruffled feathers of average or below-average students and their parents by decorating classroom environments which prevent the gifted from learning at their natural pace. The higher we go on the scale of intellectual brilliance – and we’re not necessarily talking just about IQ – the less support is offered by the education system, yet the more likely are conceptual syntheses and grand intellectual achievements of the kind seldom produced by any group of markedly less intelligent people. In some cases, the education system is discouraging or blocking such achievements, and thus cheating humanity of their benefits.”
― Christopher Langan

“In mathematics, in physics, people are concerned with what you say, not with your certification. But in order to speak about social reality, you must have the proper credentials, particularly if you depart from the accepted framework of thinking. Generally speaking, it seems fair to say that the richer the intellectual substance of a field, the less there is a concern for credentials, and the greater is concern for content.”
― Noam Chomsky

“Every subject is much easier than the people who wish to make money teaching it would have you know. So, for every single subject that can be systematized, there is a systematization that allows you to get 80% percent of the power with probably 5 or 10% of the effort. So the key question is that you have to prove that you have the superpower to rearrange the subject, to disintermediate the people who get paid for teaching it – which will always push you towards mastery, which is a question of getting the last 2 or 3% out of the system. And so the good news is that you can rearrange any subject to learn most of it very, very quickly. The bad news is that it will feel terrible because you will be told that you are doing the wrong thing and dooming yourself to a life of mediocrity as a jack of many trades, master of none – but in fact, the problem is that the jack of one trade is the connector of none. Good luck!”
― Eric R. Weinstein

“Why but Learning would not be made common. Yea but Learning cannot be too common, and the commoner the better. Why but who is not jealous, his Mistresse should be so prostitute? Yea but this Mistress is like ayre, fire, water, the more breathed the clearer; the more extended the warmer; the more drawne the sweeter. It were inhumanitie to coop her up, and worthy forfeiture to conceal here.”
― John Florio, The Essayes of Michael, Lord of Montaigne

“Ramanujan had lost all his scholarships. He had failed in school. Even as a tutor of the subject he loved most, he'd been found wanting.

He had nothing.

And yet, viewed a little differently, he had everything. For now there was nothing to distract him from his notebooks- notebooks, crammed with theorems, that each day, each week, bulged wider.”
― Robert Kanigel, The Man Who Knew Infinity: A Life of the Genius Ramanujan

“Learning is nothing but discovery that something is possible. To teach means to show a person that somethingis possible.”
― Frederick Salomon Perls, Gestalt Therapy Verbatim

“The great artist represents in all but funds—that is, by his own word—the confessional aristocracy of an erudite if autodidactic intelligence, one that is forever imparted from the vantage of an outsider.”
― Jacob H. Kyle, The Tedium Lies

“In the good old days of ‘actually existing Socialism,’ every schoolchild was told again and again of how Lenin read voraciously, and of his advice to young people: ‘Learn, learn, and learn!’ ... Marx, Engels, and Lenin were each asked which they preferred, a wife or a mistress. Marx, whose attitude in intimate matters is well known to have been rather conservative, answered ‘A wife’; Engels, who knew how to enjoy life, answered, of course, ‘A mistress’; the surprise comes with Lenin, who answered ‘Both, wife and mistress!’ Is he dedicated to a hidden pursuit of excessive sexual pleasures? No, since he quickly explains: ‘This way, you can tell your mistress that you’re with your wife, and your wife that you are about to visit your mistress…’ ‘And what do you actually do?’ ‘I go to a solitary place and learn, learn, and learn!”
― Slavoj Žižek, The Plague of Fantasies