Because of how we are exposed to it, for most people education is at best a necessary step in the progression of their life and at worst a mind-numbing obligation we can’t wait to finish. But education shouldn’t be thought of like a 12 to 16-year hostage situation we’re in with our parents and employers. Rather, education is a process, one that lasts a lifetime, and the value of which depends far more on what you put into it than on its component parts.
Why is Self-Learning Difficult?
While we’re in school we have very little freedom to control or direct our education. Outside of those boundaries—be it as a student expanding their knowledge outside the classroom or an adult looking to broaden their own horizons—education becomes a primarily self-directed and more intrinsically fulfilling activity. Researchers have stressed the importance of the lifelong pursuit of education.
In their 1982 research paper, “Self-Education: The Process of Life-Long Learning,” researchers Maurice Gibbons and Gary Phillips point out that “less than one percent of a person’s life is spent in classrooms,” and that “even the best-educated adults have five decades or more still to live after they graduate,” highlighting just how much of our lives are spent outside of obligated learning. The need for learning does not become less important, but instead “becomes greater, more urgent, during adult life.”
This stresses the importance of taking responsibility for our own education, as well as encouraging us to understand how much control we have over the vast majority of our own education. As Gibbons and Phillips put it, “the most important frontier of education is the vast, undeveloped realm of human experience that lies outside the narrow boundaries of formal schooling.”
Professors Eurig Scandrett and Elaine Ballantyne wrote a chapter “Public Sociology and Social Movements" for the book Public Sociology As Educational Practice which criticizes formal university structures and practices. They offer non-formal education alternatives. Compared to formal education, “non-formal education…can be more self-directed, collective, and democratic . . . not restricted to the professional educator." Instead, it can be cultivated "in the lives of students . . . but also workers, parents, artists, activists, religious believers, etc.”
How Do Librarians Facilitate Learning?
Here, libraries have an important role to play. Libraries are not just the place where encyclopedias are kept but publicly accessible repositories of knowledge and curators of resources, data, and information that one needs to educate themselves on their own terms.
In an article for Psychology Today, Dr. Peter Gray extols the enduring importance of public and academic libraries, even in the digital age, as “places of voluntary, self-chosen education,” and “staunch supporters of intellectual freedom [that] have been changing with the times.” Not just providing books, but increasingly as “centers for self-directed education." Libraries are centers of community that cultivate “the idea that education comes not just from what we traditionally call study, but also from creating things, playing, and socializing.”
How Can I Teach Myself to Focus at the Library?
In a modern world with constant stimuli, it can be difficult to take time out of our busy, complicated lives to commit to the long, slow, gradual process of learning new things. When our memories of formal education are so often tinged with boredom and futility, it can feel almost uncomfortable trying to renter that mindset.
But the human brain is a mighty tool, and it cannot subsist on the monotony of work emails and empty media. And when allowed to direct its own path, rather than following reluctantly the predetermined course of others, the brain can be an astoundingly quick and enthusiastic seeker of new knowledge. With the breadth of resources available on the internet, individual is more empowered than ever to educate themselves than ever.
If you would like to test your own brain’s willingness to create its own path of self-education, here are a number of places that can help you get started:
A variety of both free and paid services provide a high quantity as well as quality self-education courses, including Udemy, Coursera, edX, and SkillShare.
Online platforms such as Khan Academy, YouTube, and TED provide a wide array of free and highly informative educational content on all manner of subjects.
Perhaps most importantly, libraryfinder.org allows you to locate the nearest library to you, where you begin your self-education journey right away, or ask them for further resources to find your own path.