Autodidactic: Individual Self-Learning

Millions of people pay a king's ransom for college tuition to learn what is free for the taking when motivated by a compelling desire to learn. In the movie Good Will Hunting, Will (played by Matt Damon) chides an arrogant Ivy League student for paying a fortune for an education that would be free but for the price of a library card. Although this is absolutely valid, very few people believe it. Instead they are convinced the knowledge they could acquire on their own is secondary to paying a lot of money to an institution which will attest that they have, even if they cheated their way through the process. 

As they say, cheating only suffers the cheater.

Credentialism has existed for centuries in one form or another as groups with an information or knowledge advantage have tried to maintain their position of superiority with everything from guilds and associations to secret societies and esoteric languages. And even though teachers and educators have noble intentions, their position in our economy, by design is dependent upon a psychology of the scarcity of knowledge. 

Time is the most scarce resource, with knowledge being freely available, whether in institutional settings, or for the individual to discover. There are also those in between, who look to those before them for guidance or example, and then set off on their own.

Whole categories of attributes from self-help to self-directed inquiry have been coined to disguise and set apart individual learning as an aberration so as not to displace the hierarchical power of educators. And yet, throughout history self-educated men and women from all walks of life and social stations have risen to the occasion of the challenges facing them. In so doing, they have set new standards for learning, which without question have raised the bar of achievement for their respective societies. But only in the latter half of the twentieth-century has the insidious notion that one must have the blessing of an institution to function in society been generally accepted without protest. 

More: Autodidactic Hall of Fame

We don't necessarily need more teachers and schools, but more educators and more willing students. Institutionalization or confirmation of knowledge by universities isn't what we need, but simply a facilitation of the process of learning. What we have now is a predatory system which simply uses and feeds off of students through debt.