index
Branching off into six sections.
This is the e-zine The Autodidact.
Primarily an autodidact is defined as a person who directs their own education (note the singular "they" there; no, it is not bad grammar), often being self-taught, motivated, wide-eyed, and willing to learn with intense passion and direction.
There are more of us than you think. Mark Twain, Ansel Adams, Frederick Douglass, Walt Whitman, Benjamin Franklin: all autodidacts.
Autodidacticism has also been infused into the more modern form of education called unschooling. The term, invented by the educator John C. Holt, refers to a certain loose set of beliefs, including:
Traditional schools are places in which people fail to learn; they are inherently unfree and do not foster creativity, motivation, or interest on the student's part.
A person learns best, not by "being educated," but by living: connecting their interests with the world in whatever manner works best, be that apprenticeship, sitting down and studying, or simply taking a stroll outside. Schools do not offer this range of options, instead providing children with workbooks and textbooks, many of which don't relate to the real world and stifle any true learning.
Children, and people in general, can be trusted to learn what they need when they need. It's useless to provide them with swamps of information on Math, History, Science, and so forth. In the first place, the divisions of knowledge between math, history, and science are completely arbitrary; life is not lumped into subjects, and any activity can be said to contain many disciplines. Secondly, no one will retain knowledge unless they are genuinely interested in the topic at hand, and letting someone learn what they're interested in will make them happier and more motivated.
In other words: the school-people may say that one needs to learn algebra at age 12, but if a 12-year-old unschooler feels no need or desire to learn algebra at the present time, they won't. If they ever need to learn algebra in the future, it will still be there, and they'll be able to learn it better because this time they will have a purpose for doing so.
Clear enough? Carry on, then. The various sections of the zine contain more specific articles, and six articles (or more) are published each month, one for every section: who, what, where, when, why and how.