The entirely of the article is very interesting, but there were two very subordinate thoughts of Morgan's that struck me as very provocative.
First, he says that, before setting out for "the Indies" (the east coast of Asia, as, you recall, Columbus expected to reach), Columbus
was studying the old writers to find out what the world and its people were like. . . . Columbus was not a scholarly man. Yet he studied these books, made hundreds of marginal notations in them and came out with ideas about the world that were characteristically simple and strong and sometimes wrong, the kind of ideas that the self-educated person gains from independent reading and clings to in defiance of what anyone else tries to tell him.
I truly applaud this observation of Morgan's, about the self-educated person. My experience includes encountering several people who precisely fit that picture. Such people know a lot, but often not as much as they think they do; and, more important, a lot of what they "know" is wrong.
I wish I could identify exactly where the pitfalls of self-education lie. Maybe this—from my own experience—will help shed a little light.
At one point, for the sake of the work I was doing in my job, I decided I ought to have a little more knowledge of organic chemistry. So I got my hands on a college organic chemistry textbook.
Well, the problem was that the organic chemistry course in college usually assumes you've taken a prerequisite course, perhaps inorganic chemistry. And I had not had that course. I had had a high-school chemistry course, and no college chemistry at all. Therefore, I was at a disadvantage in trying to learn organic chemistry. I did not have the background knowledge that the book assumed, I lacked what I needed to make what the book had to say meaningful.
Not that I could gain nothing from the book. The real lesson is, if you don't have a systematic education in a field or subject, if you have bits of knowledge acquired piecemeal, you are going to have some gaps in what you know and understand, and maybe, like the self-taught people I've known, you get some wrong impressions. Imperfect or inadequate understandings are sometimes no better than a lack of understanding. At least in the latter case you may realize that you don't know something, rather than believing you understand the matter when in fact you have incorrect ideas.
Further thoughts inspired by Morgan's article in the next posting.
Copyright © 2010 by Richard Stein
A self-educated person might know the ropes and muster an ability to take care of himself. It has become apparent that formal education can't and doesn't succeed alone in the formation of an educated public. Many educators openly advocate trade schools over formal education paths. To many self-education is a thing of the past but to at least some it represents an alternative to pitfalls in advanced higher learning. We live in a difficult day and age where jobs are scarse and daily prospects for success are questionable. Perhaps there is room for some self-education, testing the waters, rolling up the sleaves, putting in an honest days work, and learning from experience. Abe Lincoln did it and so might we.
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