The year after I graduated from university – from a degree that I struggled through dutifully and mostly dispassionately – I began to feel that I had missed out on an actual education. Like many other students, I’d entered university keenly aware of high tuition fees and the threat of student loans and, as a result, I often chose classes based on the employment opportunities they offered. But once I graduated and secured a job, I found myself returning to the interests I had abandoned along the way: literature, art, history, philosophy. I wanted to understand the ideas and events that had shaped the world around me. And I wanted to, like the thinkers I admired, use historical anecdotes to analyse a contemporary event, or put different novels and artworks in conversation with each other. Could I teach myself to do the same?
The internet is full of resources for self-directed learning: for any subject, you can easily find blog posts about essential texts, links to university syllabi, and hours of YouTube lectures. When I attempted to make use of these guides, however, I often found myself disengaged and unfocused. I chastised myself for scrolling through social media while watching online lectures, or forgetting most of the ideas inside the books I read.
The problem, however, wasn’t my attention span. It was my approach: I was struggling because I saw learning as a solitary pursuit.
What formal education institutions offer is a community where students learn from both professors and their peers. But universities aren’t the only places where these relationships are built. The historian Jonathan Rose’s history of autodidactism from the 18th to 20th centuries, The Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes (2001), shows how those with little to no formal education can cultivate rich intellectual lives. Rose draws from memoirs written by miners, weavers, labourers and housemaids, which vividly depict the kind of social structures that can help people learn. I was surprised and gratified to find that self-study didn’t require isolation. In 18th-century Scotland, for example, miners founded libraries where members pooled their annual subscription fees to buy books. These libraries were often associated with ‘mutual improvement’ meetings, where working-class men could learn from each other. ‘At each meeting,’ Rose writes:
One member would deliver a paper on any imaginable subject – politics, literature, religion, ethics, ‘useful knowledge’ – and then the topic would be thrown open to general discussion. The aim was to develop the verbal and intellectual skills of people who had never been encouraged to speak or think.
Learning is better understood, they suggested, as a highly collaborative social practice
Rose’s autodidacts weren’t just learning about other people’s ideas. They were also learning to take their own ideas seriously. ‘There was complete freedom of expression,’ Rose observes; ‘the teacher-pupil hierarchy was abolished, and costs were minimal.’ Many of the people involved were seeking knowledge for knowledge’s sake, but the education they received – from books, and from each other – often shaped them into social reformers and political radicals. Francis Place, for example, was a tailor whose formal education consisted of a single spelling book. He later became a strike leader, birth-control advocate, and an organiser for the London Corresponding Library (which lent books and organised weekly meetings for members). His memoir, published only posthumously in 1972, describes the library’s impact on its working-class members:
It induced men to read books, instead of wasting their time … it taught them to respect themselves, and to desire to educate their children. It elevated them in their own opinions … [and] elevated them in society.
I was touched by Place’s words, which reflected what I wanted from my own education: self-respect, more meaningful ways to spend my time, and an enlarged sense of how to contribute to the world. And I began to see how self-directed learning required more than just the self. The most influential forms, it seemed, involved dedicated communities – what the anthropologist Jean Lave and the educational theorist Etienne Wenger call ‘communities of practice’ in their book Situated Learning (1991). Conventional models of learning tend to focus on individuals, who are assumed to merely internalise knowledge from others. But Lave and Wenger’s ethnographic study of five different communities – ‘midwives, tailors, quartermasters, butchers, non-drinking alcoholics’ – drawn together by a shared profession or passion, led to different conclusions. Learning is better understood, they suggested, as a highly collaborative social practice.
I was also relieved to discover that the people whom Rose, Lave and Wenger studied often made do without teachers. The mutual improvement societies Rose describes show how gratifying peer-to-peer relationships can be. And even among communities of practice where people were formally apprenticed to a more experienced professional, Lave and Wenger found that there was ‘very little observable teaching’ – apprentices often learned from each other, not just from their superiors.
This is good news for learners who haven’t found a teacher or knowledgeable mentor yet. And it suggests that, even in a formal educational environment, the best teachers are those who promote egalitarianism over hierarchical learning.
My interest in self-directed learning eventually led me to the Brazilian philosopher Paulo Freire, one of the most influential educational theorists of the 20th century. In his impassioned manifesto Pedagogy of the Oppressed (1968), he criticised the idea that ‘the teacher teaches and the students are taught … the teacher knows everything and the students know nothing.’ True learning, Freire believed, could be accomplished only ‘through the restless, impatient, continuing, hopeful inquiry human beings pursue in the world, with the world, and with each other.’
One way to describe Freire’s philosophy, Daniel Walden writes, is that ‘the teacher is not so much an authority as a more experienced student.’ This seems like a radical redescription of what teachers are meant to do in the classroom.
More experienced students can show newer ones what it’s like to be generous to your peers and open to new perspectives
Walden is a classicist who began his career teaching the ‘Great Books’: foundational works of Western literature and philosophy, often emphasising Greek, Roman and biblical texts. In a recent essay in The Point magazine, Walden suggests that Freire’s educational approach closely reflects his own goals as a teacher of the Iliad, the Odyssey, the tragedies of Aeschylus and other classical texts – even those he doesn’t know particularly well. ‘My own teaching benefits tremendously from being unable to pretend to any kind of expertise,’ he writes; ‘texts outside my disciplinary wheelhouse have become some of my favourite material to teach precisely because I can explore them alongside my students rather than insisting that I have something they need.’ Of course, Walden isn’t quite like the students he teaches because he’s spent years studying subjects that others are approaching for the first time. But by demonstrating his own intellectual humility and curiosity, he can invite students to embody these traits too. More experienced students can show newer ones what it’s like to be generous to your peers and open to new perspectives. ‘The secret ingredient,’ Walden writes, ‘is not only the syllabus but the intellectual community that is formed.’
Walden’s description resonated with me because I had experienced this myself: an intellectual community that helped me, and my peers, explore new ideas together.
Seven years after graduating from university, I signed up for a philosophy class taught by the poet Zoe Tuck. In our weekly Zoom conversations, Tuck acted less like a superior than a charismatic, encouraging peer. We read Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology of Perception (1945) together, slowly working through passages that exhilarated and perplexed us. Some people in the group had formally studied philosophy, but many hadn’t. Together, we learned to approach the text with the right balance of humility, confidence and curiosity. And we learned, too, what it meant to pursue self-directed learning in a community.
I had moved from the passive experience of reading a book to the more receptive, social practice of discussing it with others. But I wanted an even more active, generative education: I wanted to produce new works and forms of knowledge. In a university setting, this typically takes place when students need to submit a significant project or thesis. Where else could I find models for self-directed learning? This question led me to stories where someone’s intellectual interests helped launch an unexpected creative career. When J R R Tolkien and C S Lewis first met in 1926, neither man had written the novels that made them famous. Instead, Tolkien was a professor in the English department at the University of Oxford, who had published scholarly works in a small niche, and Lewis was a departmental fellow. The two became closer after realising that they both loved reading Nordic poetry, even though it was unrelated to their research.
A formal education is, for many, only the beginning of one’s intellectual and creative life
A year earlier, Tolkien had shown his mentor an epic poem he was working on, inspired by Norse mythology. His mentor wasn’t particularly supportive, and ‘advised him to drop it’, as the sociologist Michael P Farrell notes in Collaborative Circles (2001), his study of creative friendships. Tolkien resolved to keep his poem a secret. But when he worked up the courage to share it with Lewis, he received a remarkably supportive response: warm praise, along with detailed feedback about specific lines. Being encouraged by a peer may have healed some of the insecurities of being rejected by a superior. As Tolkien gratefully observed:
The unpayable debt that I owe to him was not influence as it is ordinarily understood, but sheer encouragement. He was for long my only audience. Only from him did I ever get the idea that my stuff could be more than a private hobby.
The two began reading each other’s drafts in a critique group that eventually grew to seven members. Two widely read and beloved fiction series eventually emerged from this group: Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings (1954-55) and Lewis’s The Chronicles of Narnia (1950-56). Today, both men are remembered for their novels, not their earlier academic careers.
In the first few years of my self-directed education, I envied those who seemed to have the ideal formal education, complete with the right professors, peers and structure. But stories like these helped me realise that a formal education is, for many, only the beginning of one’s intellectual and creative life. I began, slowly but surely, to piece together what my own intellectual life looked like: taking online classes with writers and literary scholars; joining in-person book clubs to deepen my understanding of challenging texts; and finding friends who offered generous, useful feedback on my work.
Relationships like these might be the most important resource for learning something new. You can teach yourself almost anything, it turns out, within a community of encouraging and intellectually ambitious peers.