I Have Had Little To No Formal Education
You Can Do A Lot On Your Own. I Did.... I have a strong formal education. 2 of the 3 high schools I attended in the 1960s made it to William Bennett's 1980s honour roll of 60 distinguished American private high schools. I have 3 degrees from a research university everybody's heard of. Nevertheless, many of the important things I know, I had to teach myself. You too can teach yourself a lot at home. Here's what I suggest:
50 reference books in the house. Amazon sells loads of nice stuff of this nature.
Watch PBS now and then.
Know when and how to use Wikipedia.
Then you will have more education content than most people have.
N.B. Some of what I write below (e.g., PBS, SAT, college meaning varsity) is specific to the USA.
What remains to be done is learning to write decently. This is hard to do by self-education, if only because most middle and high school teachers aren't doing a good job either. When I was a teen, I kept a notebook in my chest pocket. Every time I ran into a word I didn't know, I would copy it into that notebook. Next time I was home, I would look up the word in the dictionary my father had when he was in college (during the depression). Thus I looked up 20-50 words a week. This came in handy when I did the SAT.
Back in the day, I wrote in a way that consciously imitated the adult prose I found in books for adults, and in Time and Newsweek. I studied the many parts of my school English texts that were not covered. When I started college, I had to spend an hour in a room, scribbling in a blue book on some meaningless egghead topic. When the results were announced, I was in the 8% of the freshman class who were excused from freshman English. Don't get the idea that I was awesome. I did not understand that the subject of a gerund was in the possessive until after I started college. I was over 50 when I first became consciously aware that the subject of an infinitive was in the ob<x>ject case. I still am not comfortable with the that - which distinction. Last century, the SAT people offered a multiple choice test of English usage. You had to take it if you wanted to go to a good private college. I did well in it. I was amazed at how poorly most people scored in this.
I don't know of a one stop book that covers the essentials of critical thinking and scientific method. I have noticed a growing awareness of a number of mistaken patterns of thinking. 2-3 years ago, I was accused of the "No True Scotsman" fallacy, and that led to some nice self-education. If you spend 20-30 evenings in Wikipedia reading this entry, and the ones it links to,
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_fallacies
you will know a lot more than most college graduates, even more than a lot of PhDs. And it will be USEFUL knowledge. I think that a dozen-odd basic fallacies should be warned against in high school, and that a semester course in critical thinking should be required for a quality college degree. But I am not holding my breath.
50 reference books in the house. Amazon sells loads of nice stuff of this nature.
Watch PBS now and then.
Know when and how to use Wikipedia.
Then you will have more education content than most people have.
N.B. Some of what I write below (e.g., PBS, SAT, college meaning varsity) is specific to the USA.
What remains to be done is learning to write decently. This is hard to do by self-education, if only because most middle and high school teachers aren't doing a good job either. When I was a teen, I kept a notebook in my chest pocket. Every time I ran into a word I didn't know, I would copy it into that notebook. Next time I was home, I would look up the word in the dictionary my father had when he was in college (during the depression). Thus I looked up 20-50 words a week. This came in handy when I did the SAT.
Back in the day, I wrote in a way that consciously imitated the adult prose I found in books for adults, and in Time and Newsweek. I studied the many parts of my school English texts that were not covered. When I started college, I had to spend an hour in a room, scribbling in a blue book on some meaningless egghead topic. When the results were announced, I was in the 8% of the freshman class who were excused from freshman English. Don't get the idea that I was awesome. I did not understand that the subject of a gerund was in the possessive until after I started college. I was over 50 when I first became consciously aware that the subject of an infinitive was in the ob<x>ject case. I still am not comfortable with the that - which distinction. Last century, the SAT people offered a multiple choice test of English usage. You had to take it if you wanted to go to a good private college. I did well in it. I was amazed at how poorly most people scored in this.
I don't know of a one stop book that covers the essentials of critical thinking and scientific method. I have noticed a growing awareness of a number of mistaken patterns of thinking. 2-3 years ago, I was accused of the "No True Scotsman" fallacy, and that led to some nice self-education. If you spend 20-30 evenings in Wikipedia reading this entry, and the ones it links to,
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_fallacies
you will know a lot more than most college graduates, even more than a lot of PhDs. And it will be USEFUL knowledge. I think that a dozen-odd basic fallacies should be warned against in high school, and that a semester course in critical thinking should be required for a quality college degree. But I am not holding my breath.
70-79, M