People often don’t consciously retain information they don’t value, consciously or unconsciously. In the face of a lack of curiosity, or desire to improve, change takes place merely subconsciously, and in the areas in which we do desire to see change, or improve in knowledge, we enable ourselves to be more readily able to do so. This is part of the problem with students retention of information in the formal education system. While content is presented, a reason to value such content is often missing, the desire to learn becomes diminished, and only the desire to pass the class remains, in which short term memorization replaces active contemplation with an interest into experiential and theoretical knowledge of the topic. Although a person may pass a class and graduate, they don’t retain the information if they didn’t want to learn it in the first place, and this is the problem formal education has. If you take a class you are interested in, which contains information you deem as useful or beneficial, you will learn the subject on a more profound level, as it is your will which desires to spend time developing knowledge in the subject, rather than your will being focused on passing a test and not on the content itself.

With an autodidact approach to learning, you effectively save yourself from the strenuous process of memorization for scoring purposes, and solely become the willing participant directed toward what you value, thus maximizing the ratio between learned content, valuable content, and knowledge retention. The important aspect is knowledge retained in this fashion, through actively selecting the sources and content which you wish to incorporate into your knowledge base, is selected in accordance with your experiential values, and stems from your individual value system, making that content tailored to you as an individual.

Choosing what to influence you, choosing what experiences you need to grow, such as through fear, curiosity, or rational judgment of success through attainment, through authors, books, what speakers, what information to enter your brain, to study, on your own, you are choosing what you actually want to learn, and in this way you retain the information you wish to learn, and not just arbitrary information, but significant information. This method of learning on your own causes the content you to be exposed to, to fall in line with your own personal virtues. In attempting to learn on your own through your own directed sources rather than someone else’s, you are held responsible and you can live even from mistakes in judgment on which content or experiences you choose. You bear the responsibility more profoundly for the success or failure of your endeavors, in either case you grow more significantly than being spoon fed another’s plan.

This isn’t to say that nothing beneficial is gained through the developed formal education system, I’m more pointing to the benefits of pursuing one’s own course additionally or in place of the formal system. Now you can see the downside, an expert in a subject such as a professor is supposed to choose the best content with his personal experience to teach the class, and in this way his teaching may be more beneficial, but to have requirements in formal schooling of certain credits you need to move on to your field you wish to study, is useless as it wastes your time in being exposed to knowledge you don’t wish to learn, and therefore won’t learn. An autodidactic approach refines wisdom in the pursuant through his experience in selecting optimal sources from which to draw upon, but the opportunity cost consists in the time lost pursuing things which a wise and competent expert in a field may have already weeded out as an ineffective source, or incorrectly formulated source, from which his competency could have been an aide to you in your journey to knowledge.

While both the formal education system, and an autodidactive education system, have their ups and downs, it really boils down to prudence in utilizing which source fits best for you, at certain times of life. It may be optimal to have an early formal education system, to be exposed to a broad selection of topics, from which you can derive your own individual value system from. Once exposed to a variety of topics, and gained the potentiality of branching into broad domains of knowledge, it may then be optimal to pursue the things you have uncovered as being more interesting, beneficial and useful to yourself, on your own accord. The balance between the two, and the utilization of recourse, the wisdom to know when and in what stages of life, all should be considered as to our individual progression. What must be acknowledge is that education ought not end in formal schooling, but I believe, we must continue to grow, and push ourselves, no matter our station in life, if we wish to grow closer to the potential Being which we strive to embody. This necessarily entails an altogether fallibilistic, autodidactic approach, whether this is the only source of education, or merely secondary, remains in the hands of the individual, but its instantiation and our ability to use it wisely can aide us in growing in knowledge and competency throughout life, regardless of the financial or temporal restrictions we may have.