An Autodidact's Bible, #2

Part 1, Chapters 1 and 2

This is the second installment in the serialization of my upcoming book Reclaiming Your Mind: An Autodidact’s Bible. If you missed part one, you can find it here.

Part 1: The Problem

Chapter 1: Learning How To Learn

You hold in your hands a book, and you do this even though you probably should be doing the dishes or the laundry or working to get the latest TPS report or term paper finished. The fact that you’ve made that decision is the best any author can hope for, and you have my humble gratitude. Now, it’s my job to earn the attention you’ve so graciously extended me on credit.

At the risk of losing myself a sale from the word go, my honest suspicion is that you do not need this book. Fortunately for my royalty statements, the fact that you’ve picked it up indicates that you probably don’t know that you don’t need it, so let’s get started:

Once upon a time (always a reliable opening for a book), you knew how to learn anything. Nobody taught you to speak. Nobody taught you to walk. Nobody taught you how to eat or run or climb trees or walk up and down stairs. Some of you (statistically speaking) even taught yourselves how to read and how to speak your second language. The world was your toy box, and its secrets were yours for the plundering.

So what happened?

In the ten-to-fifty years between then and now, the world got confusing, complicated, and impenetrable.

But why?

And how did learning get so difficult?

And expensive, too! The world is world full of training courses, overpriced colleges, educational politics, certifications, and self-help books (like this one) all looking to make a buck or two or twenty thousand off your hunger for education. All for...what reason, exactly?

Well, dummy, I hear my seventh-grade English teacher say, the world is complicated and we have to learn from other people in order to navigate in it.

And in saying that, she wasn’t wrong. The trouble is, she wasn’t right either. So, to make life interesting, let’s tackle all these questions at once.

Two Kinds of Learning

When I was a subject of the school system, teachers and other authority figures frequently outlined to me the difference between “book learning” and “street smarts.” The former were the kinds of things you learned in a library—history, math, language, science, philosophy, etc. The latter, on the other hand, was what you needed to know to survive walking through a rough neighborhood, or to keep from getting conned by a slick salesman, or to survive peer pressure and the temptations of petty crime.

These two kinds of knowledge, so the story went, were largely divorced from one another. They came from different places, they inhabited different planes of existence, and never the twain should meet.

Well, as the Brits would say:

Bollocks to that. Bollocks all the way down.

Fortunately, as I grew older, I was disabused of this notion by a more comprehensive model of learning theory.¹ According to this theory, everyone has a different style of learning—some folks are contemplative, some folks are active. Some are intensely visual or auditory, some are relational, some are kinesthetic, and if you don’t tailor the learning environment to cater to these different styles, you’re going to leave people behind.

Various versions of this theory took the educational world by storm, and I (like other folks who were psychology and educational theory students at the time) studied them eagerly and with gusto.

As any farmer will tell you, a little bit of bullshit will fertilize your fields. A mountain of it will burn your crops. And boy, oh, boy, did I (and the rest of the educational establishment) get burned.

Educational theory is one of those delightful pursuits that tries to solve a big problem without lowering itself to the messy business of examining the problem to determine its true nature, or bothering to take the slightest notice of the consequences of any attempts made to solve these most-urgent-yet-unexamined-problems. In medicine, when the treatment to a disease causes problems of its own, these problems are called “iatrogenic.” In educational theory, iatrogenics abound.

To be fair, the problem Educational Theory is (putatively) attempting to solve is a genuine one:

How do you make sure that everyone has an equal shot at learning the things they need to in school, so they will be successful in life?

As we will discover, there are some very good reasons that this problem is difficult to solve. Chief among them is a fundamental misapprehension at the root of the question: the problem with education isn’t education, it’s schooling.

Educational Theory is an heroic attempt to develop the perfect aspirin to permanently solve the headaches caused by an unnoticed brain tumor growing out of control—and the result is pretty much what you’d expect: ever-increasing amounts of money spent on generation after generation of citizens who, for their educational dollar, acquire an adequate-but-attenuated command of the very basics (spelling, reading, addition, and subtraction) and an ever-diminishing command of everything else.

So if education is the aspirin, what is the brain tumor?

This book is an attempt to answer that question, as well as providing some tools for digging the tumor out. To start with, consider this:

Sitting in rows and filling out forms may be the least efficient way for human beings to learn most things. It’s boring, it’s moribund, it allows little room for discovery. It neither encourages thought nor allows room for criticism. At best, it may become a guided introduction to territory that a student may hopefully wish to engage on their own—at worst, it’s a systematic confirmation of the anti-intellectual contention that “All that there book-larnin’ ain’t nuthin’ but a pile o’ crap.”

In other words, if your worst enemy has written a book that you want to make sure never gets read or appreciated, make it part of a high school curriculum.

But enough of that for now. We’ll dive into more about the problems with schooling and the crippling effect it can have on your ability to learn things later on in the book.

So forget about everything you’ve heard about the difference between “book smarts” and “street smarts.” The distinction is no more relevant than the difference between “math” and “poetry” (and there is far less difference between those two fields than you’ve been led to believe, as well). Forget, too, everything you’ve heard about “learning styles,” “modalities,” and “emotional intelligence.” We’re interested in recovering that brilliant access to the world that you were born with, and to do that, we need to start at the beginning:

There are two major kinds of learning. The experimental/playful (Type-1), and the imitative (Type-2). Figure out how to harness those, and your work is done—or, more accurately, your work can finally begin. The bulk of this book is devoted to how to use those two kinds of learning to give yourself access to the sum of human knowledge and experience, and to do it without getting trapped in ideological or intellectual cul-de-sacs that will lead to stagnation. The rest is devoted to techniques, tricks, heuristics and other shortcuts that will allow you to move through the intellectual and experiential landscape with greater ease than you might do otherwise, but these are a bonus that most autodidacts will arrive at eventually, one way or another.

If you take nothing from this book other than the recovery of these two ways of learning, then you’ll have done the bulk of what it takes to make the world your oyster once again.

Last First Words

A final issue before we get started:

Why?

Why bother to learn the art of self-teaching? Why waste time reading this book (or any of the books this book recommends, etc.) when you might more profitably invest your time in billable hours, or playing with your children, or chasing the latest promotion at work?

My answer:

Because these things are not as different as they seem. In whatever domain (or domains) you pursue competence or excellence, you’re going to face a series of barriers and limitations thrown up by factors such as your IQ,² your social ranking, aspects of your personality, motivation problems, etc. (the list could go on forever). But almost all of these barriers are ones you can surmount if you have the ability and willingness to teach yourself how.

In other words, you may not be able to change the cards you were dealt, but you can learn to play that hand better—to the point where you can run rings around people considerably more intelligent or credentialed or positioned than you are.

The ability to learn without being taught, and to integrate that learning rapidly into your life, opens up vast vistas that you may not even be aware of. From new hobbies to new passions, new philosophies to better relational skills, better business skills to newfound abilities to integrate your current values and worldview into your life, and even to fundamental changes in your worldview and value system, the life of the autodidact is one of enrichment along every axis.

And yes, it can even help you keep up with the TPS reports, the term papers, the laundry, and the dishes.

Chapter 2: Why Be an Autodidact​​?

As you may have divined from the front matter in this book, the word “autodidact” is a combination of the Greek root words διδάξει (didache) meaning “to instruct” and αυτο (auto) as in “automobile.” So, an “autodidact” is someone who teaches cars. Lots of openings in the self-driving automotive industry for...

Hm. I see that I have mixed up my notes. That kind of error is a common one for autodidacts, though. When you’re making your own map, you sometimes misremember, miscategorize, and misattribute. Expect that you’ll make these kind of errors from time to time.