Learn to teach yourself

Discipule: disce te ipse docere. (Student: learn to teach yourself.)

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The meaning of the quote

In Boston in the early 1720s, a teenage printer’s apprentice named Benjamin Franklin traded letters with a friend in a long debate. His father found the letters and read them. He told Ben that his spelling and punctuation beat his friend’s, but his writing lacked style and clear thinking.

Franklin had left school at 10 and had no money for a tutor, so he built his own lessons. In the book The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin, he describes how he took essays from The Spectator, a London paper he admired, and jotted a short hint about each sentence. A few days later he rewrote each essay from his hints and compared his version with the original to find his mistakes. To build his vocabulary, he turned some essays into poems and, once he had forgotten the prose, turned them back again.

The quote asks every student for the skill Franklin taught himself, which is how to be your own teacher. A teacher can explain fractions or French verbs, but a student who can set their own lessons and catch their own mistakes keeps learning after school ends.

In the book The Hidden Habits of Genius, Yale music professor Craig Wright says these Latin words should be carved over the entrance arch of every school. Most schools, even top universities, never directly teach students how to keep learning for life, and Wright found that the people who change the world pick up most of what they know on their own. He backs this up with the science fiction writer Isaac Asimov, who said in 1974:

“Self-education is, I firmly believe, the only kind of education there is.”

Asimov earned a doctorate in chemistry and went on to write or edit more than 500 books, including guides to Shakespeare and the Bible.

Action steps

Franklin’s method needs nothing more than a book and a notebook. Pick one skill you want to learn this month and teach it to yourself this way.

1. Set your own test.
   Read a page, close the book and write down everything you remember.
2. Mark your own work.
   Compare your version with the source and fix every mistake before you move on.
3. Let your mistakes pick the next lesson.
   Franklin found he lacked words, so he wrote poems to build his vocabulary. Let your weakest spot decide what you practise tomorrow.

In 1733, at 27, Franklin taught himself French, Italian and Spanish, and then went back to Latin, the language of the quote.

School gave Franklin 2 years of lessons, and he spent the rest of his life teaching himself.

Resources

• The Hidden Habits of Genius by Craig Wright (Book)
• The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin (Book)
• Benjamin Franklin wasn’t a natural talent. Here’s how he taught himself to write (Article)
• Ben Franklin’s method for becoming a better writer (Article)
• Isaac Asimov (Wikipedia)