ABSTRACT
Putting together ideas from the previous fifteen chapters which were written by those who knew from first hand experience, something valuable about autodidactism, has been an absorbing and often surprising exploration. I did not begin by speaking to the other authors about what I thought of the general topic, and even the complete title of this book was unknown until long after all the writing was finished. My understanding of the topic grew partly from my own experiences, but much more from reading and rereading their chapters, and trying to see patterns in them. The point of this whole procedure was to ensure that we did not engage in a semantic wrangle about the meanings of terms, or of chickens and eggs. Autodidactism is not a very graceful word at the best of times, and the contributors were all wise enough not to labour over producing yet more definitions of it when the real need was to show it in action. ‘Showing’ is a useful word, borrowed from the ancient art of rhetoric which abandoned logic and depended instead on the telling of stories (Billig 1987) for the purposes of persuasion-trying to get others to see things as you yourself do, as Jack Diamond remarked in the last chapter. Rhetoricians regard the logical approach as far more domineering and invasive than their own. For them rhetoric can be symbolised as an open hand, while logic is represented as an implacable tub-thumping closed fist which makes discussion almost impossible. Meanwhile the working definition provided at the beginning of Chapter 1-of autodidacts as people who would rather not be taught, but do enjoy learning for themselves-will do us well enough.
