Instead of starting a short lived thread entitled Independent Scholarship, I figured the thoughts could just as well go here.
First, what are the thoughts on autodidacticism? I take it to involve a self-guiding education, which doesn't entail that one refuse the teachings of previous humans, just that one navigate such teachings on their own, in a way forming their own curriculum.
That way, we don't throw out the baby with the bath water. The bath water being the inheritance of disciplinarily constrained and perhaps ossified or obsolete learning practices, and the baby being the expertise accrued by experience. Its possible to salvage the latter without being bogged down by the former.
And frankly I don't think a thorough and pandisciplinary autodidacticism was possible before the internet, but debate is welcome there. The closest thing, I suppose, would involve basically living at the library.
As it is, the educationary materials are there, more or less for free, to be absorbed and strung together by the internet autodidact, a role of great potential, perhaps certain revolutionary potential. I'm still feeling out how well this can be connected into the kind of information-exploiting capitalist regime described by the likes of McKenzie Wark. I've used the term "cognitariat vanguard" to describe this kind of bourgeois cadre of independent internet autodidacts, with political sympathies toward the far left.
There could be something worth defining and elaborating there, but I'm still not sure.
Communist pipedreams aside, a sort of internet autodidactic praxis can still have serious merits - that is, a sort of metaguide for self-guidance.
Naturally I'm always inclined to make grand connections between grand projects, in this case a connection between a radical autodidacticism and a sort of proto-ubermensch type. Again, its tough to make definitive claims regarding such things, but I think it is possible to extend this kind of program beyond an autodidactic scholarship, and into the territory of awakening a kind of gnosticism, terraforming the psychic culture into one that may prove hospitable for the mass production of higher beings, atheistic messiahs.
So to lay aside the more bombastic and highfalutin elements, the central inquiry here is regarding the optimal practices for autodidactic internet scholarship, a kind of post-university scholarship. The degrees will remain exclusive to those who can afford them, but the educational potential is now, as far as I can tell, in the commons - even if we restrict ourselves to legal practices.
And I can take greater pains, if need be, to sever the more fantastic and hubristic prospects from the more realistic ones - but I do believe that ones reach should always extend ones grasp, so long as such a tendency can be reconciled with inner peace, which I believe it can.