My overall message is that the original poster's line
> Ultimately, what people need to realize is that autodidacticism is the most efficient form of learning.
Is making a huge statement about everyone and every possible topic to learn!
He is making an absolute statement about human psychology of all things. Thankfully absolutes statements are easy to disprove, only a single counter example is needed!
> I personally have taught myself the vast majority of what I know.
Well I'd say that I also taught myself the vast majority of what I know! :) But to be fair that is because I spend multiple hours per day reading! That said, I'd also argue that self directed reading is not the most efficient way of learning. On more than one occasion I have spent days reading up on topics and then only been enlightened after having a 10 minute conversation with a friend!
Likewise, all the mathematics and the vast majority of the science I know comes from instructors at school. I am good at math[1] (heck I love math!), and I was likely in the top 20% of students to pick up on stuff in class, but by no means could I have taught myself! Thankfully I went to a community college where classes were small and resembled a back and forth discussion between students and the professor, so it wasn't a strict "lessons from up top" type of learning either.
Which kind of is my overall point, some topics require a different learning style! Rote memorization is actually really good for learning some types of material.
Likewise, for all those math classes, group discussions after class where we all brought our understandings together to form one cohesive whole, was when everything really clicked. The lecture for an hour got us started and gave us the foundation, two hours of study group dedicated to solving actual problems with what we had just learned is what brought full comprehension.
There is no one catch all solution for the entire population. If we were going to be truly civilized about it, we'd design tests to discover how people best learn, and put them into classes accordingly. Heck make it tests per topic even, how I learned writing is different than how I learned math!
[1] Well used to be good at it, back when I still used it in school. :)
