Autodidacts: From Ibn Tufail's Feral Philosopher to Self-Taught Coders

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In a large Stack Overflow poll, nearly 70% of software developers said they were essentially self-taught. This episode traces autodidacticism, the deliberate choice to direct one's own learning without a teacher, back to Marrakesh in the 1160s and Ibn Tufail's philosophical novel Hayy ibn Yaqzan. Its hero is a boy raised by a gazelle on a deserted island who dissects his dead gazelle mother, works out circulation and vital heat, studies the motion of the stars, and reasons his way to an uncaused cause. Historian Avner Ben-Zaken shows how the text traveled to 14th century Barcelona, Renaissance Florence, where Pico della Mirandola drew on it, and Enlightenment Europe as an argument against intellectual gatekeepers.

Before 1800 almost no universities taught engineering, so the Industrial Revolution was built by self-taught mechanics such as James Watt, who learned the math and chemistry he needed and joined the Lunar Society and the Royal Society. Historian Heather Andrea Williams documents enslaved Black Americans who taught themselves to read under anti-literacy laws, a collective effort the episode links to the philosophy of I am because we are. Mass schooling in the US expanded partly when automated glass bottle machines displaced child labor, and Ivan Illich's 1971 Deschooling Society called for cooperative learning networks. The hosts explain pedagogy, andragogy and heutagogy, coined in 2000, and Lev Vygotsky's scaffolding.

• The Lunar Society met at the full moon so members had light to ride home.
• The University of Glasgow gave its broken model steam engine to Watt, a mathematical instrument maker, to fix.
• Frederick Douglass tricked white neighborhood children into spelling games to learn the alphabet.
• Others learned letters from markings on ship timbers or from discarded newspapers, and some ran secret night schools.
• Architect Tadao Ando never received formal architectural training.