Importance of being self-taught

Serena Cuoghi
Title of Professor of Biology

The constant modernization in the educational procedure, supported by tools that make it possible to access knowledge, serves as a positive stimulus so that each time more people assume their professional training in a self-taught way, which offers a great variety of advantages, being seen as the most important: 1) the optimization of time and resources for those who decide to train independently, choosing to do it at home or in more comforting and intimate; 2) the authentic connection of the person with their natural abilities and their particular tastes, prevailing over the fashions and academic trends of past decades; 3) reduction of educational desertion due to the opportunity to identify and select the knowledge needed in a truly personalized way; 4) development of a transdisciplinary mentality through which the same person can combine knowledge of different areas, generating in turn new knowledge that increases the development of the rest of The humanity; 5) reduction of investment costs by the States for the support of professional institutions governed by the formal education scheme.

The development and mass use of the Internet has brought multiple benefits for the sharing of humanity, not only for business visibility and the economic globalization and the mechanisms for buying and selling products and services, but has also provided a real highway for the dissemination of the knowledge, through increasingly efficient and specialized resources for each area and where experts have taken a step forward towards the formation of new professionals, under a scheme that overcomes the limitations of the educational paradigm that governed professional academic training within public institutions and private all over the world.

Fruits of discipline and perseverance

To be able to educate yourself in a self-taught way, a deep honesty with yourself is required, through self-knowledge and the exploration of abilities and tastes personal information of each one complemented with an intention on what to do with the acquired knowledge, beyond this, a strong dose of discipline that allows to assume the perseverance and the development of a personalized study method as essential ingredients to achieve any objective raised.

The result of the combination of all these resources builds, step by step, an unmistakable path towards success for the self-taught person who, being the creator and director From her own learning experience, she can detect and correct in time any type of failure in her learning and in what she is developing through what has been learned, hence self-taught people are considered highly capable and efficient in their professional performances and tend to be hired for positions and occupations, in many cases, with higher remuneration of those people who have been busy having a portfolio full of academic titles institutional.

progressive minds

The human mind is itself transdisciplinary. Among the particular tastes of a person there is a wide repertoire of options, for example, the same person can have preferences for strawberries and also likes apples, and in turn she may prefer the former in juice, while the latter to eat whole. It is the same for all the other factors and existing possibilities, a dentist can feel a great passion for her profession and at the same time dedicate herself to jewelry with wire rope, which can lead her to swap tool and material handling techniques between her profession and her hobby doing something to her perfectly normal.

In this sense, self-taught education allows a constant exchange between knowledge and the benefits that may be obtained if knowledge is intertwined between the different areas, mental exercise that strengthens the problem-solving capacity of the person in different situations, since this ability of the brain under training The self-taught person is capable of extrapolating beyond the professional level, addressing all other aspects of the life of the self-taught person, turning them into someone with greater potential for assertive resolution, a talent that directs as a consequence towards the pleasure of doing things for pleasure and the progress they experience with each achievement reached.

intellectual independence

Another aspect of profound importance that those who assume their own education in a self-taught way benefit from is independence in their intellectual development, sensation of freedom that is restricted and limited by following a single scheme such as that of university degrees, even more so under the content guidelines academics selected for the particular interests of those who design the curriculum and not for what may be needed or of interest to both the student and the external labor reality, since it is functionally unsustainable to make constant and personalized changes between the contents offered through education overcrowded.

Intellectual freedom allows the individual to make their own rhythm of life more flexible in order to assume knowledge with the highest possible quality, at the same time that he seeks to exercise in a practical way the reinforcement of what has been learned, generating results as he progresses with his studies, a phenomenon that allows him to become financially independent with much faster than a person who has to expect to meet all the objectives of a formal career, in order to obtain the necessary title that validates his knowledge and going out to a labor sector, for which very possibly you are not really qualified due to the lack of experience and the speed at which companies evolve and the technology situation that is being understood by more and more business and project leaders, coupled with the fact that a self-taught person also becomes a creator of their own projects with which to become economically independent, providing large contributions to the rest of the global economy and the reduction of public spending by part of the States.

We are all self-taught in some sense.

Some skills we learn by ourselves and for this we resort to the trial and error system. Thus, faced with an unexpected problem and about which we know nothing, we begin to test possible solutions until we find a satisfactory answer.

There are two possible approaches to autodidacticism. One would be that of the one who has the need to find answers to his questions or concerns and the other is based on the pleasure of learning for learning's sake. In any case, the 21st century student has some novel tools: the seekers of Internet, YouTube tutorials or Apps for all kinds of topics.

New technologies are changing the traditional binomial-based learning model student-teacher and somehow we all end up being self-taught in some moments of our lives.

References

Chamorro, A. b. (2014). The origin of technology in education: pioneers/The beginning of application's technology in Edu: the pioneers. History and social communication, 19, 409-424.

Santillan, M. TO. v. (2018). Self-learning and its impact on the quality of learning of Higher Education students. Opuntia Brava, 10(2), 169-175.

Torrico Redondo, R. (2012). Musical children: 21st century self-taught. Music and Education: International Journal of Music Pedagogy.

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