Self-education has become a necessary educational method in this day and age since it is a form of continuous learning that people adopt throughout their lives to learn how to rely on themselves, make decisions, and assume responsibility. In this article, we will learn about the concept of self-education, its emergence, and its manifestations at the present time, in addition to self-education statistics and studies.
Self-education allows you to expand your knowledge and develop your skills without the guidance of an educational institution in order to set your own goals, plans, and timeline. Self-education is not limited to people who do not attend educational institutions. You can turn to self-education to expand your knowledge in a certain field while or after you attend an educational institution.
Self-learning has existed since classical antiquity and has played an important part in the lives of such Greek philosophers as Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle Other historical examples of self-directed learners included Alexander the Great, Caesar, Erasmus, and Descartes.
Early scholarly efforts to understand self-directed learning took place some 150 years ago in the United States. Craik (1840) documented and celebrated the self-education efforts of several people. About this same time in Great Britain, Smiles (1859) published a book entitled Self-Help, that applauded the value of personal development.
However, it is during the last three decades that self-directed learning has become a major research area. The groundwork was laid through the observations of Houle (1961) (University of Chicago, Illinois). He interviewed 22 adult learners and classified them into three categories based on reasons for participation in learning: The first category is goal-oriented, who participate mainly to achieve some end goal; The second category participates for social or fellowship reasons; The third category perceives learning as an end in itself. It is this latter group that most resembles the self-directed learner.
The first attempt to better understand learning-oriented individuals was made by Tough, A Canadian researcher and one of Houle's doctoral students. His dissertation effort to analyze self-directed teaching activities and subsequent research with additional subjects resulted in a book, The Adult's Learning Projects (1979). This work has encouraged many similar studies with various populations in various locations.
Another important research effort was Guglielmino's (1977) dissertation. She developed the Self-Directed Learning Readiness Scale (SDLRS), a tool subsequently used by many researchers to measure self-directed readiness or to compare various self-directed learning aspects with numerous other characteristics. Spear and Mocker's (1984) work on organizing circumstances showed how important it is to understand a learner's environmental circumstances in promoting self-directed learning and improving its quality.
Following this rich history in self-education, how does it manifest today in our societies? We will present the following example to clarify the idea of self-education.
Mohamed is a hardworking university student who is passionate about his major, marketing. One time, his professor asked him to complete a project in e-Marketing. Unfortunately, Mohamed did not have sufficient experience in this subject. Therefore, he decided to resort to self-education and learned some e-marketing basics in order to complete the project. He identified his learning resources and dedicated time to learning more on his own. Moreover, he set his goal, which was identifying the main topics he had to study in order to finish the project. After committing to his project, Mohamed was able to finish on time and impress his professor with his remarkable work.
Mohamed's story can help us deduce the reasons, steps, and benefits of self-education: Mohamed relied on self-education and applied its steps after setting the subject and goal, which was learning more about e-Marketing to complete his project. Then, he identified learning resources, such as YouTube, Coursera, and Udemy, and established a personal study plan to commit to his learning schedule.
Do certain factors improve the level of self-education?
We must take into consideration the factors that may affect the quality of self-education. These are academic and social factors. Academic factors include the number of learners, their background, IQ levels, and the ability of each to apply self-education on their own.
Social factors include age, maturity, attention span, special talents or abilities, physical or emotional limitations, relationships, and social and economic conditions.
I will present some statistics to demonstrate the benefits of self-education: the global (electronic) self-education market will reach USD 325 billion by 2025, and 77% of American companies used online self-education in 2017.
My experience has taught me that self-education is extremely useful in digging deeper into my academic major. I am a software engineering student and have been self-learning cybersecurity for about a year now. I took several courses, the most recent of which is the cybersecurity expert course offered by the Ministry of Communications and Information Technology. I am committed to my daily learning schedule, which is from 9:00 am to 3:00 pm, without feeling tired or bored. In the field of cyber security, I can position myself between intermediate and expert. In my opinion, self-education is an effective approach to skill development in a certain field, which is often technical. You must be very passionate about this field because if you lack the passion, you will not be encouraged to continue and you will stop the process before you even begin. Based on this information, you can determine if self-education is right for you and your personality.
