Autodidacticism

An autodidact is a person self-taught in a field of interest, the field is irrelevant; the training is suspect, and the individual often lives with a continuous low-level anxiety of being ‘found out,’ of being determined to be lacking in some way important to the field of interest. Indeed, Pierre Bourdieu, who I have mentioned in earlier posts, makes this point explicitly in his book ‘Distinction,’ well worth reading. Worth reading even if you don’t like French theorists…

As someone who has spent much of my life as an autodidact Bourdieu’s words struck home, an insight that cut clear of the general level of academic theory that masquerades as knowledge in the academy. The failings of the autodidact are as often failings of omission, rather than commission – of not reading widely enough, of not engaging with critical works in a lively, timely, and active way – and thus, often, only re-affirming the position already established. Sounds very much like pundits, academic or otherwise, on any side of any issue.

But the realities of being an autodidact have been brought home again with my decision to withdraw from the Masters in Urban Studies at SFU. For while the title wouldn’t actually get me a coffee, the theory was that the degree would lend some small legitimacy to my comments on urban affairs in general. No ‘advanced’ degree, no legitimation.

But Jane Jacobs didn’t have an advanced degree. Nor do most politicians. Nor, I suspect, do most small business owners. Eric Hoffer, an influential American philosopher and writer, finished high school. I think. Plato, Socrates, Johnson (as in Boswell’s ‘Life of…”), and I suppose thousands more managed to engage their intellectual faculties to great effect without ever getting a ‘degee’ in general, let alone an advanced degree at a recognized institution.

This is not to say there is no value in the effort expended to gain the degree. What it is meant is that the social value of the degree, the intellectual value of the degree, and the ‘rent’ rendered to gain the degree do not necessarily reflect any broad-based ability to work outside the unbelievably narrow confines  of academic disciplinarity.

Jacobs is like the most widely read urbanist in history. She had an undergraduate degree. Thousands of academics have drawn on her work – they have referenced her in quotes, using her authority to stake knowledge claims for their own work – and they have probably had hundreds of thousands of undergraduates read ‘Death and Life of Great American Cities’ to establish in their students minds not only Jacob’s importance, but their own. How many academics, anywhere, can claim the breadth and depth of importance, that Jacobs achieved by writing a polemic as an interested amateur?

Jacobs was, relative to her time, an autodidact. She had no ‘training’ in urban planning. She had no training in statistics, sociology, anthropology, architecture, traffic, engineering, economics, or any of the other ‘disciplines’ that may have, just maybe, qualified her to take on Robert Moses, and American urban planning in general.

And, yes, I’d like my brain surgeon to have ‘accredited’ training. But I’d also like my fellow road users to have some training – they are far more likely to kill me than any surgeon. I like to know that the pilot in the 747 has some training, though I’d like to think she also has thousands of hours of experience as the ranking officer on the flight deck. And I’m really hoping my electrician is up-to-date on the electrical code. The difference in all these examples is that the training is practical, empirical, hands-on.

I recognize that most of these people can be autodidacts, though it is pretty tough I think to learn to fly the 747 pretty much on one’s own, and I suspect that the social stigma related to being an autodidact is diminished, if not totally removed. I know from personal experience that many people are amazed that I can ‘fix’ stuff, and that is almost entirely self-taught. How many bicycle 3-speed hubs did I have to work through before I felt I could repair virtually any of them, given available parts? But the critical thinking skills necessary for the ‘advanced’ degree are equally necessary to dismantle, diagnose, and re-assemble, virtually anything we try to repair – that’s why we need editors on occasion.

Perhaps the single most important perspective I gained while doing my undergraduate degree was that, in the end, the degree didn’t matter. But I had to have the degree, in hand, in order to have the authority to say so.

And, I think, if Jane Jacobs can do it, if Robert Hughes can do it (with no degree at all), if those thousands of individual, autodidactic, intellectually-minded individuals can do it, so can I.