Ed tech promoters need to realize we’re not all autodidacts.

Just because self-teaching worked for him doesn’t mean it would work for most kids.

Photo by Suzanne Plunkett/Reuters

When Bill Gates was still a teenager, he would sneak out of his
family’s house before dawn and ride his bike to a building on the campus
of the University of Washington. He had discovered that the
university’s huge supercomputers were idle between the hours of 3 and 6
in the morning, allowing the budding computer enthusiast to teach
himself how to program—night after night, until the sun came up.

At a young age, Gates was already an autodidact, someone compelled to
learn for himself what he needed to know. Over the course of his life,
Gates has maintained this habit: He dropped out of college after two
years, but he has continued his education through incessant reading and
conversing. Michael Specter, a New Yorker writer who profiled Gates for the magazine, has said
that the Microsoft founder “is one of these autodidacts who reads,
reads, reads. He reads hundreds of books about immunology and
biochemistry and biology, and asks a lot of questions, and because he’s
Bill Gates [he] can get to talk to whoever he wants.”

Gates is particularly interested in these topics because of his
philanthropic work combating disease in developing countries. Another
arm of his philanthropy, of course, involves the promotion of technology
in education. Many of Gates’ fellow leaders in the ed tech world are
also members of the autodidact club. Computer scientists, engineers,
entrepreneurs, academics—they are a self-selected group of individuals
who have schooled themselves in a fast-changing field for which there is
no settled syllabus, no well-established curriculum. In turn, their
preferences and proclivities have shaped the educational technologies
that the rest of us use, as well as the expectations we hold about what
ed tech can and should do.

Researchers have gone so far as to call the very notion of self-directed learning “an urban legend in education.”

This is no surprise: We all rely on our own experiences in forming
our ideas of how learning works. But the experiences of ed tech creators
and promoters are notably influential—and notably unusual. Most people
are not autodidacts. In order to learn effectively, they need guidance
provided by teachers. They need support provided by peers. And they need
structure provided by institutions. Amid all the effusions about how ed
tech will “change the way we learn,” however, these needs rarely merit a
mention. Instead we hear about the individual and his app, the person
and her platform, as if teachers, classmates and schools were
unnecessary and unwelcome encumbrances.

This is a very particular take on learning: the autodidact’s take. We
shouldn’t mistake it for most people’s reality. Productive learning
without guidance and support from others is rare. A pair of eminent
researchers has gone so far as to call the very notion of self-directed
learning “an urban legend in education.”

In a paper published in Educational Psychologist
last year, Jeroen J.G. van Merriënboer of Maastricht University and
Paul A. Kirschner of the Open University of the Netherlands challenge
the popular assumption “that it is the learner who knows best and that
she or he should be the controlling force in her or his learning.”

There are three problems with this premise, van Merriënboer and
Kirschner write. The first is that novices, by definition, don’t yet
know much about the subject they’re learning, and so are ill-equipped to
make effective choices about what and how to learn next. The second
problem is that learners “often choose what they prefer, but what they
prefer is not always what is best for them”—that is, they practice tasks
that they enjoy or are already proficient at, instead of tackling the
more difficult tasks that would actually enhance their expertise. And
third, although learners like having some options, unlimited choices
quickly become frustrating—as well as mentally taxing, constraining the
very learning such freedom was supposed to liberate.

And yet, to paraphrase
the economist Larry Summers: There are autodidacts. Look around. We all
know at least one successfully self-taught expert, and the tech world
is teeming with them. How’d they get that way?

Here the psychological literature is largely silent. There are
assessment tools, such as the Self-Directed Learning Readiness Scale,
which asks those
who complete it to agree or disagree with statements like “I know what I
want to learn,” “If there is something I want to learn, I can figure
out a way to learn it,” and “No one but me is truly responsible for what
I learn.”

These instruments are officially agnostic about where the “readiness”
to engage in self-directed learning comes from, but they’re often
employed as if such readiness is an inborn characteristic of the
individual, even a personality trait.

Is self-directedness, in fact, innate? Though it doesn’t speak
directly of autodidacts, the psychology of motivation and interest
suggests that self-directed learners are not only born, but can be made.
The research suggests it’s likely that the autodidacts among us did
make the wrong turns and poor choices van Merriënboer and Kirschner warn
about—made them, but then kept going until they got it right. It’s
likely that their keen interest in their subjects carried them past the
failures and frustrations that would have deterred less ardent learners.

And it’s likely that they had more help along the way than is
generally acknowledged. When Bill Gates was a senior in high school, he
wangled an independent study project writing code for the computer
system of a local power station. There he was supervised by a man named
John Norton, “who Gates says taught him as much about programming as
almost anyone he’d ever met,” according to Malcolm Gladwell’s Outliers.

Gladwell’s title is apt: Bill Gates is most certainly an outlier in
his relentlessly self-directed acquisition of knowledge. But there’s no
reason the rest of us can’t cultivate the autodidact’s virtues of
persistence and passion. By the same token, the autodidacts who create
and promote the educational technology used by the rest of us could keep
in mind that the support of people and institutions is always integral
to learning.

For most, that will mean the physical presence of teachers, of peers,
of classrooms and schools. No human being learns in isolation;
education is an inherently social enterprise. Even the autodidact is
surrounded by social influences, guided by the voices of parents and
past teachers, as he roams library stacks and Internet sites alone.