Want to be a lifelong learner? Don’t go it alone

The year after I graduated from university – from a degree that I struggled through dutifully and mostly dispassionately – I began to feel that I had missed out on an actual education. Like many other students, I’d entered university keenly aware of high tuition fees and the threat of student loans and, as a result, I often chose classes based on the employment opportunities they offered. But once I graduated and secured a job, I found myself returning to the interests I had abandoned along the way: literature, art, history, philosophy.

I wanted to understand the ideas and events that had shaped the world around me. And I wanted to, like the thinkers I admired, use historical anecdotes to analyse a contemporary event, or put different novels and artworks in conversation with each other. Could I teach myself to do the same?

The internet is full of resources for self-directed learning: for any subject, you can easily find blog posts about essential texts, links to university syllabi, and hours of YouTube lectures. When I attempted to make use of these guides, however, I often found myself disengaged and unfocused. I chastised myself for scrolling through social media while watching online lectures, or forgetting most of the ideas inside the books I read.

The problem, however, wasn’t my attention span. It was my approach: I was struggling because I saw learning as a solitary pursuit. What formal education institutions offer is a community where students learn from both professors and their peers.

But universities aren’t the only places where these relationships are built. The historian Jonathan Rose’s history of autodidactism from the 18th to 20th centuries, The Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes (2001), shows how those with little to no formal education can cultivate rich intellectual lives. Rose draws from memoirs written by miners, weavers, labourers and housemaids, which vividly depict the kind of social structures that can help people learn.

I was surprised and gratified to find that self-study didn’t require isolation. In 18th-century Scotland, for example, miners founded libraries where members pooled their annual subscription fees to buy books. These libraries were often associated with ‘mutual improvement’ meetings, where working-class men could learn from each other.