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My own personal experience says yes to the question.
I already had basic skills (reading, writing, math and others). I worked at a place selling newspaper trial subscriptions. This is something that's not taught at school.
I was given a script to work with (which included "selling points" - an euphemism for objection rebuttals). Through serendipity and scientific means, I've taught myself to sell and I mean sell well. Since my thinking was outside of the box, I know that my knowledge would never be duplicated at a selling school. I can say that I heavily tested my ideas with great success.
Do you have any personal experience where you feel that teaching yourself is far better than what you could learn at a school?
My own personal experience says yes to the question.
I already had basic skills (reading, writing, math and others). I worked at a place selling newspaper trial subscriptions. This is something that's not taught at school.
I was given a script to work with (which included "selling points" - an euphemism for objection rebuttals). Through serendipity and scientific means, I've taught myself to sell and I mean sell well. Since my thinking was outside of the box, I know that my knowledge would never be duplicated at a selling school. I can say that I heavily tested my ideas with great success.
Do you have any personal experience where you feel that teaching yourself is far better than what you could learn at a school?
EdX
You can always self learn, but I think what's missing is a level of rigor, quality assurance, and the pressure to do well. The universities are there when you take a class, you're under pressure to do assignments, take exams, to do well enough to pass the course and on top of that you're paying for it (usually) and that in theory should motivate you to study harder and learn the material. If you just take a course that's online, even with exams, I think it's missing that aspect that the universities has as you can easily just drop out and forget about it, google the answers, and call it a day without ever affecting your bottom line.
I could teach myself anything, but usually I'm too lazy to do it, unlike back when I was in school, it was do or die.
Absolutely. Some of the most famous scientists had zero or little formal education. Thomas Edison only has 3 months of schooling yet is arguably the best inventor of all time. Does anybody think he would have been better off had he completed a bachelor of arts major in history?
You learn more from discussion with peers than from classroom education or just reading in a bedroom/watching videos. So, whether you learn ore in one particular way or another depends on what you do with what you are learning. Do you go and discuss/develop the concepts you are learning? Or do you just memorize them and spit them back out on a test?
Can you learn more through being self educated than educated?
No. It's not an either/or question; it's both/and. The person who is self educated has only that. The person who is educated has self education AND the formal education to go with it. People really need to stop with the assumption that education is binary. That's a false logic used by some to avoid recognizing the value of education. It may be partially true the day after graduation, but quickly loses any distinction. People who are educated have both education and experience.
Can you or will you? I suppose you CAN but few WILL. Theoretically, we all have the libraries of the world in our back pockets and could learn anything pretty much anywhere but how many people learn enough about a single subject to be an expert on their own? My bet is even less would give themselves a well rounded education. I honestly cannot say that I've ever met anyone who was self educated to any degree though I have met people who THOUGHT they were self educated when in fact they didn't know enough to know that they needed to buy a clue. One thing an education does for you is give you a glimpse of just how little you know. I know I knew a lot more when I graduated from college but I understood that I didn't know nearly as much as I thought I did before. You have to challenge your thinking. It was usually the coursework outside of my major that did this in my case. My philosophy, psychology and religion classes to be specific.
Can you learn more through being self educated than educated?
No. It's not an either/or question; it's both/and. The person who is self educated has only that. The person who is educated has self education AND the formal education to go with it. People really need to stop with the assumption that education is binary. That's a false logic used by some to avoid recognizing the value of education. It may be partially true the day after graduation, but quickly loses any distinction. People who are educated have both education and experience.
ITA!
I taught myself to play the piano because we couldn't afford lessons. I took about six months of lessons and then was self taught from there. It sounded good when I played but I had no idea just how much I didn't know. The problem with teaching yourself is the teacher doesn't know what questions to ask let alone the answers so it's a long slow process that yields limited results. Sitting through Yamaha classes with my two dd's was an eye opener. It's funny. I know more about music now but I feel like I know less because I'm aware of the limits of my own learning. I taught myself enough to sound good when I played but I missed the big picture. I taught myself to DO something as opposed to understanding it.
OTOH I'm well educated in chemistry. The other day while sitting at a restaurant really killing time before I needed to be back at the school for an event I became mesmerized by a drop of water. I was thinking about molecular polarity, hydrogen bonds, how the molecules arrange themselves, surface tension, electron configuration, etc, etc, etc and just marveling at this thing called water we take for granted. Its bond angles coupled with its bond polarity allow it to surround salts and dissolve them and carry them to the cells in our bodies.....and so on....I was almost late getting back the school all because there was a drop of water on the table. I can't look at things and not see the arrangements of the electrons that give them the properties they have. I will admit that after 9 years of teaching chemistry I've started asking questions I never asked before so my self teaching on top of my education has been beneficial but there's no way I would be here if I were only self taught.
Someone once said that the more you know the more you see in what you look at something. Uneducated people and most likely self educated people look. Educated people see.
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ITA!
