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by brg 546 days ago
Michael Faraday, Thomas Edison, and Henry Ford were all autodidacts, and their contributions to society are beyond imagination.

You bring up a good point though, and the two directions in this thread are both important.

1 comments

Autodidacts learn on their own. They are not taught by others. That means the teaching skills are not passed along from teacher to student. Pedagogy is more like cooties than like a science. We share it socially and once you've "caught it," you're "contagious."

Richard Feynman, an autodidact outlier, famously mistook mastery of a subject for being able to easily explain that subject to the lay person because he could do both. These are separate skills. He probably learned to teach from family, given his techniques and his stories about his childhood and the prevalence of extended family at the time.