Toward a Theory of Self-Directed Learning: A Study of Experts Without Formal
Training
Maurice Gibbons (c) 2008 Personal Power Press International
from The Journal of Humanistic Psychology (Spring, 1980), pp. 41-56
Maurice Gibbons, Alan Bailey, Paul Comeau
Joe Schmuck, Sally Seymour, and David Wallace
Summary
The authors analyzed the biographies of twenty acknowledged experts without formal training
beyond high school in search of commonalities that might suggest ways people become
effectively self-directed in learning and accomplishment. Of the 154 characteristics identified,
the fifty rated as most important were examined. They outline a pattern of education that is
sharply focused, active, experiential, self-directed, situational, and often personally
challenging. They indicate a personality that is both traditional and radical, and they suggest a
life theme of gathering purpose and drive. The authors transform their analyses into fourteen
hypotheses about education, about a form of schooling that would prepare students for a life of
self-directed learning and attainment.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------The Problem
We usually think of learning as something that occurs in an educational institution under the
direction of a teacher, within the structure of a course, based upon textbooks and evaluated by
a written examination. To become expert one is usually expected to attend such an institution
until some certification of expertise is granted. But this is a narrow view of learning and
education, even for the development of expertise. We learn informally as well as formally, and
our skill at informal, self-directed learning may in the long run of a lifetime be the more
important of the two.
People spend much more time out of school than in it, even on a school day. And when school
days end, even the best educated have forty or fifty years of life and learning still ahead of
them. Continued growth during those out-of-school hours and years requires continued
learning – learning to master new jobs, to become better lovers, to meet life-crises, to find
new interests, to handle changes in society, to master new roles, to open new dimensions in
ourselves and our relationships, and to make contributions worthy of our capacities. Such
growth, or informal learning, is very different from formal education. The self-educator must
be independent, energetic, creative, and strongly self-directed. But schools, as well as such
ever-present entertainments as TV, and a growing number of institutions encourage us to be
dependent, passive, conforming and, generally, willing to be directed. A way of helping
students of all ages to become skilfully self-directed must be found and made a part not just of
schooling, but of all forms of education, including the education parents give their children and
the education that all of us give ourselves throughout our lives.
What are the basic principles of self-education and of teaching people to be self-educated?
Unfortunately, self-direction is so inconsequential a part of formal schooling that we have few
researched answers to that question. There are, however, several bodies of theory and opinion
either on the subject of self-education or subjects closely related to it. A number of
psychologists (e.g., Rogers [1969, 1977], Maslow [1954], and Perls, Hefferline, and Goodman
[1951] help students or patients to gain control of their lives by helping them to make their
own decisions, to actualize their own potential, and to convert their inner conflicts into inner
dialogues so they can resolve them. Other psychologists (e.g., Bradford, Gibb & Benne [1964],
Harris [1973], and Schmuck, Runkel, Satunen, Martell, & Derr [1972] help students and
patients learn about themselves through different froms of group process: the self-directed
Training-Group, the transactional group that learns to analyze and modify the interactions
membes have with each other, and the group method of management that enables
organizations to be productive while cultivating individual growth. On a more personal level,
Schutz [1967] and others have described ways of increasing our personal awareness and
responsiveness by becoming more sensitive to our inner lives, the world around us, and other
people.
A number of writers have developed arguments and techniques for personalizing education,
and even for teaching people to teach themselves. George Isaac Brown [1971] describes ways
to make academic learning a personal experience. Alan Tough [1971, 1978], discovering that
nearly all adults conduct ambitious self-directed learning projects every year, analyzes their
duration, nature, and purpose. Edgar Faure, chairman of the UNESCO committee that
produced the book Learning to Be [1972], concludes that education must combine practical
experience with academic studies, and it must do this in a way that promotes self-education
and prepares people for life-long learning.
Recent developments in both humanistic and behaviorist psychology are also potential
contributions to self-education theory. Russell Hill, in “Internality: An Educational Imperative”
[1978], traces the relationship between an internal locus of control over events and desirable
traits of personal, educational, and social behavior. Herbert Benson [1975] and Claudio
Naranjo [1971] demonstrate the broad spectrum of beneficial effects that accompany deep
relaxation and meditation, pointing to the potential usefulness of zen, yoga, and other Eastern
disciplines of mind to self-education and becoming expert. A number of more behavioral
theorists (e.g., Watson & Tharp, 1972]; Barbara Brown, 1974; and Mahoney & Thoreson,
1974] describe ways of teaching people to plan their own programs of action, feedback, and
reinforcement.
The tradition of the self-tutored expert, the self-made man, is recorded in the popular, very
widely read self-help literature [e.g., Maltz, 1960; Peale, 1952; Smiles, 1888] which urges
people to think positively, to imagine themselves already successful, and to act dynamically
and with confidence. One aspect of the self-help formula, personal will, is also discussed by
several pyschologists [Assagioli, 1974; May, 1969; and Frankl, 1969] as the essential
ingredient of personal efficacy and accomplishment. Will, they say, is the source of the
initiative, drive, and persistence necessary to energize and sustain self-directed activity.
Theorists concerned with the pattern of human development, such as Erikson [1950] and
Levinson [1978], also conclude that these aspects of will are important. In the form of
autonomy, initiative, industry, competence, and intimacy they become the major goals of
personal growth and the dimensions of maturity. Finally, there is the literature describing and
analyzing life histories [Collins & Moore, 1970; Csikszentmihalyi & Beattie, 1978; and Goertzels
& Goertzels, 1962]. Collins and Moore studied the lives of entrepreneurs, the Goertzels
analyzed the biographies of famous and notorious people, while Csikszentmihalyi and Beattie
studied the life themes of thirty ordinary subjects. A significant number of the subjects in each
study were self-taught. The entrepreneurs – hard drivers primarily in pursuit of financial
rewards – learn from practical experience and often suffer several failures en route to their
success. Among the many commonalities shared by the Goertzels’ subjects, one prominent
feature was their drive toward achievement, a feature also displayed by their parents
[although the subjects and their parents also share respect for learning, three-quarters of the
subjects had problems at school, especially high school.] Csikszentmihalyi and Beattie propose
that the pattern of this drive is shaped by life themes whichb begin as the pursuit of solutions
to specific personal problems and develop into generalized response-systems to problems in
later life.
Each of these bodies of literature raises issues and ideas of importance to self-education, but
they have not, as yet, been integrated into a coherent theory or practice for a form of
education which will teach people to pursue excellence voluntarily in a productive field of
human activfity. One useful approach, the analysis of lives, will be pursued in this study
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------The Procedure
One of the most promising sources of knowledge about self-education is the live sof people
who became expert in a field which did not include formal training. Adapting the method
employed by Collins and Moore, Goertzels and Goertzels, and Csikszentmihalyi and Beattie, we
decided to study the biographies of a sample of self-educated people to find out if they shared
characteristics and experiences that might help us to understand the dynamics of the selfeducation process. These we defined as people who became expert in any socially accepted
field of human activity without formal training past high school or the equivalent [except Frank
Lloyd Wright who studied one year at a university]. Although the decision eliminated selfeducated people like Mendel, Michaelangelo, Spinoza, and Shakespeare, we restricted the
sample to those whose contribution was made in the last hundred years.
Our sample was not randomly chosen. We simply constructed a list of subjects as broadly
representative as our resources allowed. Only much later did we discover more than 450 selfeducated people sufficiently expert in their fields to deserve biographies or autobiographies in
print. Nevertheless, when we later developed four different groups of subjects – entertainers;
inventors, explorers, and creators; people of letters, science and philosophy; and
administrators, organizers and builders – we found all four well represented in the list we had
assembled. A modified free-sort system was employed to gather and classify the data. We
began reading the biographies to find any item of any kind which could possibly have
influenced our subjects’ lives and their becoming expert in their fields. When readers found
such items, they identified the book and page on the file card, then wrote a precise, onesentence summary of the reference. After the biographies of six of our subjects had been
analyzed, the several hundred cards were spread over large tables and the process of category
building began. All the readers consulted in the sorting and re-sorting. Eventually, the cards
were piled into 154 categories, each representing a distinctive feature of the subject’s nature,
life, or times. These categories were consolidated into the following eight metacategories:
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
7.
8.
Background (e.g., family, community, personal history)
Subject’s Personal Characteristics
Subject’s Learning Methods
Subject’s Relationships with Others
Conditions under which the Subject Lived
Key Incidents in the Subject’s Life
Motives, Causes, Reasons behind the Subject’s Behavior
Subject’s Attitudes, Opinions and Philosophy
To establish and maintain clarity in the minds of the readers about the 154 categories, a
definition of each was written and recorded. A rating scale which included all the categories
was then developed from this dictionary of definitions. When a reader finished a book and filled
out the cards, he or she then rated each item on a scale of 1 to 7 according to its apparent
influence on the subjects’ becoming expert in his field. From numerical averages of these
ratings on the twenty subjects, the 154 items were listed in rank order. The 40 items judged
by the readers to be most influential on the subjects are listed in Table 2.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------Analysis of Data
The subjects of this study were not selected as models to be emulated but as eminent, selfeducated people from whose lives something of the self-education process might be learned.
The purpose of our analysis is to find clues rather than proofs, clues that will both lead us to
more pointed empirical investigations of self-directed learners and guide our search for
effective ways to teach self-directed learning. An overview of the list of our twenty subjects in
Table 1 and the list of forty characteristics in Table 2 leads to several obvious but important
conclusions about self-education which seem to differ from the assumptions underlying formal
schooling. First, there is great diversity in the kinds of expertise developed by these widely
admired people and in the kinds of skills they require to become experts in their fields. This
contrasts with the narrow range of fields and skills emphasized in many schools. Second, their
accomplishment grows directly out of their extracurricular life experiences. School seems to
play a remarkably insignificant role in their becoming expert, and when it is influential, the
effect is often reported as negative. Third, rather than learn a little bit about many subjects,
these people tend to focus sharply upon one particular area of activity. They maintain
unbroken concentration on one problem, project, or cluster of skills. This contrasts with the
rapidly changing focus and concentration typical of undergraduate schooling. Many of our
subjects became knowledgeable in an array of fields during the process of becoming expert in
their own. Many also achieve wisdom based upon their wide experience. But it is possible for
some to become expert in their fields without having the breadth of knowledge or culture
usually stated as a goal of formal education. Fourth, they tend to develop their expertise
through active, experiential,, self-directed, situational, often challenging means rather than the
passive, abstract-theoretical, teacher-directed means which often occur in classroom situations
where the challenge is predictable and controlled. Finally, these subjects seem to have unusual
strength of character which enables them to pursue their purposes even against great odds, in
the face of public disapproval and in spite of failures.
TABLE 1
The Subjects: 20 People Who Became Expert Without Formal
Training
1. Virginia Woolf
2. Charlie Chaplin
3. Harry S. Truman
4. Frank Lloyd Wright
5. Walt Disney
6. George Bernard Shaw
7. Wilbur Wright
8. Will Rogers
9. Muhammad Ali
10. Harry Houdini
11. H.L. Mencken
12. Aaron Copeland
13. Pablo Picasso
14. John L. Lewis
15. Gerald Durrell
16. Ralph Edwards
17. Amelia Earhart
18. Henry Ford
19. Malcolm X
20. Eric Hoffer
TABLE 2
The 40 Most Prominent Characteristics in a Study of the Biographies of 20 People
Who
Became Expert Without Formal Training
1. Primary Experience in the Area.
2. Industriousness
3. Perseverance
4. Self-Disciplined Study
5. Curiosity
6. Single-Minded Pursuit
7. Creativity
21. Physical Good Health
22. Altruistic Motives
23. Sensitivity to Others
24. Development of Interest in Youth
25. Personal Charisma
26. Avid Reading (specific to field)
27. An Incident That Led to a New
8. Ingenuity
9. Self-Confidence
10. Natural Ability
11. Assertiveness
12. Intelligence
13. Independent Exploration
14. Observation
15. Confirmational Support from Others
16. Integrity
17. Noncomformity
18. Ambition
19. Effect of the Economic Environment
20. Effect of Personal Major Achievements
Perspective
28. Emotionally Warm Family Environment
29. A Primary Relationship is Vital to Life
and Career
30. Psychological Good Health
31. Conflict in the Field of Expertise
32. Strong Personal Guiding Principles
33. Busy, Active Home Atmosphere
34. Optimism
35. Pleasing Appearance
36. Family Coherence
37. Evidence of Good Memory
38. Mother Was Major Parental Influence
39. Accident-Free Life
40. Sense of Humour
Note: This table represents 40 out of 154 categories. The numerical average on rating scales
ranged from 6.4 to 4.8 out of a possible 7.0.
The most prominent group of characteristics identified in the study describes this strength of
character in more detail. Several of them are related to drive: industriousness, perseverance,
self-disciplined study, self-confidence, assertiveness, and ambition. Several are related to
independence of thought: curiosity, single-minded pursuit, ingenuity, independent exploration,
and nonconformity. Several characteristics are also related to talent: creativity, natural ability
in the chosen field, ingenuity, intelligence and a well-developed memory. Several suggest a
strong moral or philosophical element. Besides those characteristics usually associated with the
protestant ethic (e.g. industriousness and perseverance), integrity, altruistic motives, and
strong personal guiding principles are also reported regularly. The subjects in this group are
also characterized by their attractive personalities and good health. They tend to have personal
charisma, to be sensitive to others, to be optimistic, to be pleasing in appearance, and to have
a sense of humor. In addition, they have good physical and mental health and tend to live
accident-free lives, characteristics confirmed by Maslow’s study of self-actualizing people.
The homes the subjects of this study come from seem to share some characteristics, and their
relationships with people outside the family also seem important. The members of the family
tend to be warm in expressing feeling for each other. The parents model active lives and
encourage or require their children to participate, often in challenging activities. The family
tends to stay together, offering a more or less coherent base for the subjects during their early
years. As Goertzels and Goertzels found in their study of eminent people generally, the mother
seems to be the major parental influence in the majority of cases. Beyond the family these
subjects find a few people who support them, their ideas and their efforts, no matter what
difficulties arise. Sometimes a partner provides the primary relationship and even the
complementary skill or knowledge to make the mutual activity successful, as Orville did for
Wilbur Wright’s early efforts and Eb Iwerks did for Walt Disney’s. When people are functioning
independently in unique ways in unusual fields, a social support system seems to become a
vitally important aspect of maintenance and development.
Among our 20 self-educated subjects, most developed an interest in their fields during their
youth. Some key experience either incited their interest in the activity or consolidated it. As a
result of their interest, they launched a single-minded pursuit of excellence in which the main
method they employed was self-disciplined and self-directed study. This they accomplished by
independent exploration of the field through their own investigations or experiments by
observing experts working in the field, and by reading everything they could relating to the
problems and issues that concerned them. Accidents or coincidence seem to play an important
part. Chance occurrences often led to a new perspective that enabled them to solve problems
and make breakthroughs in understanding.
It seems inevitable that people who take an independent position or pursue a valuable goal
come into conflict or competition with others. This usually motivates the self-educating subject
to even greater learning or effort. The economic environment seems to work both ways:
sometimes people seem successful because they struggle to overcome poverty, and others
seem successful because their economic independence – or disregard for wealth – left them
free to pursue their work. From another point of view, they seem determined or destined to
become expert and successful, and neither being poor and abused nor rich and spoiled seems
able to deflect their course. One of the strongest motivators seems to be personal
accomplishments that have the desired effect on the world. Whether they are cartoons,
buildings, novels, paintings, athletic victories, the success of labor in combating management,
the development of new industrial processes, or the formulation of satisfying philosophical
statements, simply doing the activity seems rewarding. Working toward an ambitious goal
gives the subjects’ efforts order, direction, and purpose: The promise of such recognition and
reward makes the goal even more important.
Analysis of these twenty subjects’ biographies resulted in a list of component parts. Is there
any way of reassembling these representative parts into a pure personality called the selfeducated person? If we cannot design the prototypical model, we can sketch an experimental
design of a life theme that seems common among those who become expert without formal
training. Although greatly different from each other in many other aspects of personal history,
they do seem to share the following narrative plot:
Some primary experience, usually during youth, focuses their attention and interest on
a particular field of expertise. This is followed by a single-minded pursuit of excellence
in the field largely through self-disciplined study and activity. Early on, they place
themselves, or are placed, in a demanding position which forces them to learn fast and
perform skillfully under pressure. Their achievements and the resulting recognition from
others consolidates their interest and encourages them to go on. The activity becomes
a way of life. Their previous experience seems to open them to unusual opportunities,
on the one hand, and intense conflict and opposition on the other. In retrospect, both
seem to have somehow contributed to their expertise and success. Throughout this
period they are helped by a primary relationship with a colleague, a friend or a lover
who provides support or the missing ingredient to make the subject successful.
Development continues through a pattern of incidents which cast new light on the field
and by challenges which lead to new insights.
While this pattern may be limited to the lives of talented people, it seems equally likely that it
may be the pattern by which any person can discover and develop the unique potential for
talented behavior which each of us possesses. These people have stumbled upon life themes
that give expression to their interest, ability, past experiences, and present opportunities. They
learn early to focus on the field of activity they find compelling and to relate all their random
experience to it. In this way, they tap into the process that leads to accomplishment,
expertise, self-education and their recognition as talented people. Talent may be the
retrospective acknowledgement that a person has identified and intensively pursued his or her
work. Talent may be a product people create, rather than a gift they receive. In this regard,
most schools seem to cultivate and reward a narrow segment of the spectrum of talent for
expertise, and they seem designed to ensure that no one is able to focus his attention and
effort on any life theme. This study suggests a number of changes that might lead to more
people finding their work and learning how to develop challenging and satisfying themes of
activity throughout their lives.
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Problems
These descriptions of informally educated experts suggest a number of interesting alternatives
to traditional practices in schooling, but our analysis must be tempered by recognition of some
fundamental weaknesses in the procedures we used. The most important is that a biography is
a questionable data base open to many forms of bias. An autobiography is even more
vulnerable. Important facts may be withheld or distorted by the subject or the author. Events,
motives, and causal relationships without any basis in fact may be added intentionally or
unconsciously. Even the mores and fashions of the times may leave their imprint on life stories
so that when industriousness and perseverance, for instance, are respected virtues, they tend
to appear in portraits of admired people written at that time. In autobiographies we may be
reading the authors’ advertisements for themselves, often describing what they wished had
been rather than what actually was. The free-sort technique and the rating-scale used in this
study also lend themselves to human error. The categories created by the raters may be
slanted by their nature and training, just as differences in their viewpoints may lead to
widespread differences in ratings, even of the same book.
Not much can be done to eliminate the biases inherent in biography and autobiography except
to be aware of them. Authoritative biographies can be searched out, or several biographies of
the same person can be used wherever possible or necessary. The free-sort was polished in a
number of ways. To improve the recognition of items for each category and the reader’s ability
to rate their importance, the category definitions were sharpened and examples were added.
By conducting regular reviews of the cue-cards on which the items concerning each subject
were summarized, we were able to monitor the quality of the entries. For further clarification,
all the readers read and rated the same biography. The interrater reliability, when analyzed,
was well within an acceptable range, but more important, when we examined specific
differences in the ratings, they proved to arise from different interpretations of the categories
among the readers. These categories were subsequently debated and redefined.
Several reviewers of the study complained that analyzing people whose success could be
attributed to their native talent proves nothing except that exceptional people do exceptionally
well at what they do. Others complained that no failures were examined so the sample is
loaded. Failures, they argue, tell us as much about what works and why as success does.
Another group argued that our references to self-education were meaningless because all
people are self-educated. and still another group argued that very few of our subjects can be
called educated by any of the normally accepted criteria we expect can educated person to
meet.
These are serious criticisms and deserve response. First, studies have shown that such
measures of talent as IQ are not reliable predictors of success in fields of activity outside of
educational institutions. Many people identified in school as potential failures become life
successes, and many identified as potential successes become failures, even in school. It
seems reasonable to hypothesize that talent requires such additional features as character,
strategy, interest, energy, encouragement, and opportunity. It also seems possible to
hypothesize that if the right combination of ability, experience, interest, opportunity, and
encouragement can be found, every person can be expert, excellent, and therefore judged in
retrospect to be talented. Next, studying failures may be helpful. Unfortunately, not many
have biographies written about their lives. Samuel Smiles (1888), the author of the 19th
Century best-seller Self-Help , when criticized for studying only success, answered,
...there is reason to doubt whether (failure) is an object to be set before
youth...Indeed, “how not to do it” is of all things the easiest learnt: it needs neither
teaching, effort, self-denial, industry, patience, perseverance, nor judgment. Besides,
readers do not care to know about the general who lost his battles (or) the engineer
whose engines blew up...It is true the best of men may fail, in the best of causes. But
even these best men did not try to fail, or regard their failure as meritorious [pp.iv-v].
All education is self-education in the same way that all jumping is high-jumping. Just as sure
as you can distinguish a high jump from an ordinary jump, you can distinguish self-directed
education from teacher-directed education, even though the individual ends up doing the
learning-or the jumping-in both instances. In self-directed education, the individual masters all
the activities usually conducted by the teacher: selecting goals, selecting content, selecting
and organizing learning experiences, managing one’s time and effort, evaluating progress and
redesigning one’s strategies for greater effect. In addition, the student of self-directed
learning, must have the initiative to launch these processes as well as the personal motivation
to continue learning, even when there is no pressure, guidance, or extrinsic reward. In selfdirected education the student has the major responsibility for the purposes and methods of
learning as well as the achievement of learning involved.
Finally, the question of the educated person. Is Ali an educated man? Was Picasso, when he
could neither read nor write? What about Hemingway, a tinkerer like Thomas Edison, a rough
union man like John L. Lewis, or even Jesus for that matter? It may be argued that a study of
experts can only help us to understand how people became self-trained and not how they
became self-educated. Education, the argument continues, requires the development of a
range of knowledge, a refinement of taste, a strength of character, and a concern for issues
that transcends self-interest. Education in this sense is not guaranteed by schooling, nor is it
denied to the self-educated. Self-educated people approach this more refined, more profound
state of learning by a different route, but many apparently do attain it, as an examination of
the list of names in Table I will show. George Bernard Shaw, H.L. Mencken, and Virginia Woolf
were educated people by anyone’s standards. The opposite argument may also be made, that
a person is not educated if he or she has knowledge and refinement, but is incompetent in
dealing with real-life issues, even in his or her own field. An ideal learning system will lead
both to expertise and to the broader characteristics of an educated person; it will be a system
for teaching oneself everything about something as well as something about everything; and it
will be a system that may begin with teacher-directed learning, but always concludes with the
power and skill to direct learning securely in the hands of the students. Nevertheless, the
subjects were chosen as examples from which we can learn about self-education, not as
examples of self-education to be emulated.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------TOWARD A THEORY OF SELF-EDUCATION
On the basis of this limited study we could call for the examination of a larger sample of selfeducated subjects by different readers. That is being done. More important, we could call for
empirical investigation of some of the principles of self-directed learning that emerged from
this study. That, hopefully, will be done by some scholars interested in this subject. We have
chosen to develop our knowledge about self-education by trial and error with programs in the
field rather than tests in a laboratory. That is, we have chosen to formulate some tentative
principles about self-education, to translate these theoretical principles into strategies we can
teach to people, and then to modify both strategies and principles interactively as we find
successful combinations and eliminate unsuccessful ones during practice.
The following principles of self-education, and their implications for teaching, have been
extrapolated from this study for that purpose:
1. In self-education the locus of control is in the self-educator whereas in
formal education the locus of control is in institutions, their representatives, or
their prescriptions. Teaching for self-education involves helping students to
internalize control over their own learning.
2. Self-education is usually a concentrated effort in one field rather than a
general study of many. Teaching for self-education involves helping students
to identify and become expert at the activity or activities that may become
central in their lives
3. Self-education is usually applied education – learning for immediate
application to a task, and from the practical experience involved in executing
it. Teaching for self-education involves integrating theoretical studies with
technical training and practical application. It means learning for specific use
now rather than learning for possible use years later.
4. Self-educators are self-motivated, that is, they are committed to
achievement in the field of their choice, even when faced with difficulties.
Teaching for self-education involves helping students to generate their own
drive toward their own goals rather than stimulating them to pursue goals set
for them by others.
5. Self-education is usually guided by a vision of accomplishment, recognition
or rewards valued highly by the individual. Teaching for self-education
involves helping students to see themselves successfully experiencing very
desirable attainments. It involves learning to plan an effective way of making
that vision a reality.
6. Self-educators tend to settle on the particular field in which their interests,
talents, past experiences, and opportunities are combined. Teaching for selfeducation involves patterns of exploration which enable students to try out a
wide range of fields of activity.
7. Self-educators tend to settle on the unique pattern of formal, informal and
casual methods by which they learn best – drawing from such possibilities as
study, observation, experience, courses, training, conversation, practice, trial
and error, apprenticeship, productive activity, group interaction, events and
projects. Teaching involves helping each student to develop a personal
learning style.
8. Self-education involves the development of attributes traditionally
associated with people of character: integrity, self-discipline, perseverance,
industriousness, altruism, sensitivity to others, and strong guiding principles.
Teaching for self-education should promote, model, and reward the
development of personal integrity rather than the opportunistic pursuit of
offered rewards, of self-discipline rather than obedience, of inner drive rather
than the avoidance of punishment or the pursuit of artificial rewards, of caring
rather than sustained competition and of strong internalized principles rather
than externally imposed rules.
9. Self-education involves the development of attributes usually associated
with self-directed and unique, even radical, people: drive, independence of
thought, nonconformity, originality, and talent. Teaching for self-education
involves promoting drive rather than passivity, independence rather than
dependence, originality rather than conformity, and the talents that make
individuals unique rather than the tasks that make them all act the same
10. Self-educators use reading and other process skills to gain access to the
information and guidance they need for their projects. Teaching for selfeducation involves training in the process skills, such as reading and
remembering, especially at the moment students urgently need to gain access
to information.
11. Self-education emerges as a theme that runs through a number of
important experiences in the person’s youth; later experiences maintain and
develop the theme until it becomes a conscious focus of choices in the
person’s life. Teaching for self-education involves helping students to identify
themes emerging in their lives, to build on those they choose, and to create
new themes they desire.
12. Self-education is best cultivated in a warm, supportive, coherent
environment in which people generally are active and there is a close
relationship with at least one other person. Teaching for self-education
involves creating an active environment in which a student’s self-directed
activities are warmly supported and there are many opportunities to form
close working relationships.
13. Self-educated people seem to like others and to be liked or admired by
them; they seem to be healthy in attitude, body, and mind. Teaching for selfeducation involves promoting a holistic approach to learning so that students
not only master some knowledge or skill, but they also develop a healthy
attitude toward themselves, others, the world and their activities.
14. In addition to cultivating expertise, the characteristics described above
outline a process of education suitable for the development of a mature
personality, for achieving self-actualization and for the process of learning.
Teaching for self-education involves helping each student to become an
expert, a participant, and a person.
These principles will become the basis for programs developed by the self-education study
team at Simon Fraser University. We have already designed and field-tested a challenge
program based upon individually negotiated learning contracts. That program is now in its third
generation. The systematic implementation, evaluation, and modification of self-directed
learning programs will continue until we have a set of principles which generate practices that
enable people to become expert without formal training.
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