The Passion to Learn

An Inquiry into Autodidactism

Joan Solomon

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2003
• Print ISBN:
  9781138866393
• eBook ISBN:
  9781134409259
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

This is the first book to provide a detailed overview and analysis of autodidactism, or self-education. Autodidacts' strong preference for teaching themselves is likely to manifest itself, in childhood, as a pronounced resistance to formal schooling. However, in later life, an autodidact's passion for learning will emerge as they participate in open or distance learning or even take responsibility for devising, structuring and following their own programme of education.
Beginning and ending with comprehensive and stimulating discussions of learning theories, The Passion to Learn includes fourteen case studies of autodidactism in informal learning situations, all written by authors with specialised knowledge. These wide-ranging case studies reflect the inherent diversity of autodidactism, yet four common themes emerge: emotional/cognitive balance; learning environment; life mission; and ownership of learning. The final chapter addresses the implications of autodidactism for educational theory, research, philosophy and psychology.
This inquiry into autodidactism provides fresh insight into the motivation to learn. It shows how closely cognition, emotion and sensory perception act together in learning processes and draws upon memory studies, neurobiology, complexity theory and philosophy to illuminate the findings. At a time when such issues as participation in education, lifelong learning and alternative, non-formal modes of teaching and learning are in the forefront of international educational discourse, this fascinating, inspiring and timely book will be of great interest to anyone involved in the practice or policy of teaching and learning.

Chapter 1
Theories of learning and the range of autodidactism

Joan Solomon

Who is an autodidact?

From its etymology, an autodidact seems to be one who teaches her or himself. Indeed a Greek friend of mine, on learning of my interest, said ‘Why use a Greek word? Why not “self-taught” ? ’

But at once there is a problem. None of us could possibly be anywhere near to being completely self-taught. From the moment our mothers put a spoonful of food to our lips so that we could suck at the spoon’s edge, we were being taught, although it must be added that quite a few babies spit out the food and seize the spoon themselves! Is that autodidactism? Every time someone speaks, or points out a bird doing something strange on the lawn, or reconfigures the computer slowly enough for us to follow—if we want to, we are being taught. Perhaps we might say, in retrospect, that we were allowing ourselves to be taught. That puts autodidacts in a new light. Why do such people, and indeed it may be nearly all of us, sometimes react in such a difficult ‘ornery’ way to being taught? This is close to some of the central problems that this book will address in trying to describe the range of autodidacts. These do not occur because autodidacts don’t want to learn. They do.

Not all children enjoy school, but we are all ‘born curious’, as Hodgkin wrote (1976). This wonderful quality, curiosity about new things, is so well established by experiment that it is used to study small babies’ recollections of music even from the time they were still in the womb, understanding of gravity, or the cadences of their mother’s voice. Even babes just a few days old will turn to look at something new and ignore effects that are old and well-known. This is the beginning of learning from experience, which is concerned with delight as well as knowledge and is the background to almost all the accounts in this book.

So ‘self-taught’ will not quite do as a complete description of the autodidact. We need a word to describe a range of people who prefer to teach themselves or to pick up knowledge from non-teaching situations, in one way or another. The state of being such a person is our title word—autodidactism. We can also tap into neighbouring and more familiar words, such as ‘autonomous’, which bring with them a whiff of independence if not rebellion. They may get angry when someone tries to teach them instead of letting them find out for themselves. It is a familiar human reaction. All two-year-olds go through this process intensively, we call it ‘the tantrums’ and it shows a perfectly healthy development of independence. Supporting comment comes from Howard Gardner. He wrote, from the results of his study Creators of the Modern World (1994), that he had found some psychological features common to all these very autonomous people. Not only were they energetic and demanding, but they also retained some of the features of childhood such as going on asking questions and ignoring the conventions, and were themselves fascinated by the exuberant, inquisitive and emotional traits of children.

Most of us have some tendencies towards autodidactism, but that does not mean that we are great creative geniuses (see Chapter 2). At one time or another we all want the freedom to choose. The wish of autodidacts not to be taught in certain ways is coupled with a great wish to learn for and by themselves. The awkwardness of these two conflicting drives can sometimes cause trouble for them at school, but may be rewarded in later life by the achievement of original outcomes and fluent personal ways of learning. Those who display these features span a great range of people. We may all have felt, from time to time, their kind of anger at being over-instructed, and their kind of exhilaration when finding out something new for themselves. Autodidacts also come, as we shall see, in a range of emotive and cognitive colours.

People sometimes think that in the days before schools and plentiful books everyone was, perforce, an autodidact. However, learning without a teacher is not necessarily the same as teaching oneself in solitude. There are many other possibilities. One is that a bank of knowledge is picked up by physical imitation. Young predators like fox and lion cubs learn to use their bodies more skilfully for hunting through play. Arthur Koestler (1966) in his book about creativity called this ‘ludic learning’, although that may well be nearer to sports training than to how autonomous learners cherish new ideas. Apprenticeship for the learning of practical skills can take place through a method of authoritative imposition, which the autonomous amongst us might find insupportable. But it could also take place in a more acceptable way, where apprentices pick up what to do by unpressured imitation. I knew one autodidact who had regularly truanted from secondary school, was unhappy at university, and only started enjoying learning in a research laboratory. Here, she told me, you were expected to pick up skills in a relaxed ‘hands-off’ way as a part of an established group. We shall also see how this method may be applied to training in a modern industrial workshop (Richard Edwards in Chapter 7).

If what we learn comes only through our bodies then the acquired knowledge may well continue to reside permanently in our bodies in a very local sense (see Polanyi’s [1958] discussion of such ‘in-dwelling’ knowledge quoted in Chapter 5). Knowledge so acquired may be essential for instinctive life-saving, and other primitive reactions over which we have little control. Swimming and judging by eye as carpenters do, and other more advanced practical skills are also largely learnt by this ancient method. However we humans learn a great deal more by our gift of speech with others, and our internal reflection about what we do, and once this happens in tandem with actions and skills that our hands have already learnt, it becomes powerful for all kinds of learning.

The start of human learning

During the 1920s Wolfgang Köhler (1925) carried out some famous experiments with chimpanzees to find out if and how they could teach themselves to solve problems. In every case a banana or other fruit was placed out of reach, and various lengths of stick and rope, and sometimes boxes, were supplied. The apes seemed to have different degrees of persistence, and different rates of success just as humans have. Köhler was able to show that the apes, some more quickly than others, were able to make simple implements from ropes and one or two sticks, or from two boxes stacked on top of each other, and use them to reach the objective. One of his interesting conclusions was that once the solution was ‘seen’, the two actions required to reach the fruit were done sequentially without pause. It is as though the ape has constructed an image of the complete solution in his mind, and then simply carried out the required actions. They seemed to learn from their own imaginative efforts. Sometimes they also learnt by imitation but they never tried to instruct each other (1925:193). Köhler was quite clear about this. Autodidactism might be a very early contribution to learning.

Very soon after news of these investigations had reached the Soviet Union, one of the colleagues of Lev Vygotsky, the famous cognitive psychologist, started some similar research in which Köhler-like problems were set to groups of four-and five-year-old children. Vygotsky and Alexander watched this with great interest and were struck not by the similarity but by the contrast with the apes’ behaviour. They commented on the ‘planful’ character of the speech which accompanied the children’s action and concluded that:

Children solve practical tasks with the help of their speech, as well as their hands and their eyes. This unity of perception, speech, and action, which ultimately produces internalisation of the visual field, constitutes the central subject matter for any analysis of the uniquely human forms of behaviour.

(Vygotsky and Alexander 1930)

This ‘internalisation of the visual field’ is richer than what the apes may have achieved, but similar. Then talk helps it to become socially shared, and this is also fundamental to making sense of learning. Vygotsky’s internalisation of the visual field is similar to Hodgkin’s ‘conceptual space’, an idea which turns up at several points in this book, especially in Chapter 5 which is about two boys playing a new building game with wet sand on a slightly dangerous beach. Like Köhler’s apes, Vygotsky’s children had to imagine their proposed procedure before carrying out the actions. Out of this prepared space came their planning. In some respects this was like the babbling talk of toddlers as they face up to a new game which later ‘turns inward’, in Vygotsky’s words, to become the basis of silent adult thinking.

If we watch two-year-olds we can often catch them talking out aloud, even if no one else is there, as they prepare to do something interesting with their toys. (And some of us adults still talk aloud to ourselves when no one else is around!). So reflecting when alone on some problem, which might have seemed to be the very prototype of isolated behaviour, can become a kind of internal theatre for the re-enactment of play or problem-solving in the playhouse of our minds. There it draws on earlier social learning situations and becomes quite similar to them. Learning by reflection may take place alone or in a group, sometimes it is intentionally taught and learnt, sometimes it is picked up by silent imitation. Often it is almost impossible to distinguish the one from the other.

Tales of autodidacts

Peter was about 15 when the following event took place. He was a very intelligent and confident boy, taller than average, and he slouched slightly in a casual way. One day after teaching about the transformation of energy I had set the school’s model steam engine going. The solid fuel pellets burnt, the water boiled and hissed out of places where the fit of the pistons in the cylinders was not too good. The piston rods punched in and out and the flywheel spun so fast as to be reduced to a blur. That and the noise and the smell was very exciting and most of the pupils pushed eagerly round the engine and shouted comments to each other. Not so Peter. With his hands in his pockets he drew away from the commotion and commented to me that he had always thought about engines and that they only worked because there was a difference of conditions. Either it was hotter inside than out, or there was less pressure outside than in, and that made it work. But, he said, as it worked it seemed like this difference got less, so that it gradually stopped working. I was amazed! This, for any reader who does not know, is a home-made version of the famous second law of thermodynamics, which seemed to have been worked out by Peter on his own.

You need to know two more things about Peter. First, he frequently truanted from school. I had not realised this until a staff meeting was called to debate ‘What shall we do about Peter?’ and as I could not remember him missing physics lessons, I put it to him soon after the steam engine episode. I said something like ‘What is this I hear about you playing truant?’, to which he answered ‘You don’t need to worry Miss, I’m always here for physics lessons on Tuesdays and Thursdays’. We may deduce from this that Peter’s truanting was quite deliberate, allowing him to learn only what and when he wanted to. There were other subjects that he did not want to learn, or some types of teacher instruction that he did not like.

The last thing to tell you is that Peter was killed soon after this. He and his friends had stolen a car and in the resulting police chase the car went out of control and the group were all injured or died. Peter did not just dislike being taught at school, he also quite enjoyed breaking regulations of other kinds. (I am not suggesting that other autodidacts are equally ‘defiant’ as Margaret Boden describes them in Chapter 2, but there might be some kind of connection in some cases, which we shall explore at the end of this book.)

The next story is about Gillian. At the time I first met her she was about 16, although to me she looked no more than nine or ten because she had Down’s syndrome. She did not talk at all during her visit, but she did seem to understand speech and probably could use words and a few simple signs in Makadon—a simplified sign language for those with learning difficulties—that she had been taught at the special school she attended. (I should add that when I saw her the following year she had learnt to read very simple work-cards, and could talk more. She also appeared to have a boyfriend from the college which she attended, to whom she called loudly across the room whenever she wanted to show him what she had done.)

On both occasions Gillian was visiting a simple Interactive Science Centre where I and my colleague Helen Brooke (see Chapter 3) had set up some simple hands-on exhibits. In the first case her teacher was with the class and I was just watching and video recording what happened. The teacher tried hard to draw Gillian’s attention to a skeleton which was lying on a table with a deflated balloon in its mouth. With her arm round Gillian’s shoulders the teacher talked trying to explain how the skeleton was breathing by pushing the plastic diaphragm in and out. She talked and taught, trying to get Gillian to take part, and to blow up the balloon, but Gillian was clearly set on escape. By ducking out of reach she finally got free and arrived at the electricity table. Here she saw two wires, which she seemed to know needed to be joined together. She also seemed to know that this might have something to do with turning on the light; but she still had some thinking to do and confidence to gain. She took the wires, one in each hand, and approached them together very hesitantly. Then she looked up at the lamp. Was she wondering whether you had to touch the lamp with the wires to make it light up? Very slowly the wires approached both each other and also the lamp. In the end I could not tell if the wires made direct contact, or if they completed the circuit through the brass housing of the lamp. But it did light up, to Gillian’s great pleasure.

It was Gillian’s body language as she tried to make her escape from the teacher’s instruction which is my abiding memory from this episode. She seemed to have just one thing in common with the gifted Peter—neither of them liked being taught. Later we found other Down’s syndrome youngsters who turned their heads and looked obstinately away while their teacher was talking, only to start work again once the teacher had gone. One might guess that the outing to the Interactive Centre was understood as a challenge to find out for themselves—that was indeed what the organiser had said to them when they arrived. It was an opportunity they did not want to lose. Another possible explanation is that the speed of their thinking was so much slower than the speech of their teachers, that it made understanding more difficult.

Elaboration of theories

Educational research, whether empirical or theoretical, has been very busy during the last fifty years. Piaget (1972) had written that ‘The attribute of intelligence is not to contemplate but to transform’. The prototypical Greek thinker, with head in hand, was now definitely out of date, but Piaget was using the verb ‘to transform’ in his own technical s...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Illustrations
• Contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Chapter 1: Theories of learning and the range of autodidactism
• Chapter 2: Are autodidacts creative?
• Chapter 3: Children in an interactive science centre
• Chapter 4: Do autodidacts have EBD?
• Chapter 5: Homo Ludens
• Chapter 6: Learning to be a genetic counsellor Patterns of life-world knowledge
• Chapter 7: Apprenticeship and lifelong learning Autodidactism in the workplace
• Chapter 8: Learning autonomously to be a primary mary teacher of science
• Chapter 9: The scientist as autodidact
• Chapter 10: The autodidactic museum in France and other countries
• Chapter 11: The useful arts
• Chapter 12: Indian market women and their mathematics
• Chapter 13: How does resource-based learning help the self-directed learner?
• Chapter 14: Learning through project work at the University of Roskilde
• Chapter 15: A long life of learning
• Chapter 16: Common features
• Chapter 17: Useful theories, great and small
• Epilogue