Editing Autodidacticism (section)

==History==
{{See also|Education during the slave period in the United States|Anti-literacy laws in the United States}}
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The first philosophical claim supporting an autodidactic program to the study of nature and God was in the [[philosophical novel]] ''[[Hayy ibn Yaqdhan]]'' (Alive son of the Vigilant), whose titular hero is considered the archetypal autodidact.<ref name="ben-zaken">{{Cite book
| publisher = Johns Hopkins University Press
| isbn = 978-0-8018-9739-9
| last = Ben-Zaken
| first = Avner
| title = Reading Ḥayy Ibn-Yaqẓan: A Cross-Cultural History of Autodidacticism
| location = Baltimore
| year = 2010
| url = https://books.google.com/books?id=17g6pHkql5oC&pg=PP1
| access-date = 25 October 2020
| archive-date = 14 August 2021
| archive-url = https://web.archive.org/web/20210814081924/https://books.google.com/books?id=17g6pHkql5oC&pg=PP1
| url-status = live
}}</ref> The story is a medieval autodidactic utopia, a philosophical treatise in a literary form, which was written by the Andalusian philosopher [[Ibn Tufail]] in the 1160s in [[Marrakesh]]. It is a story about a feral boy, an autodidact prodigy who masters nature through instruments and reason, discovers laws of nature by practical exploration and experiments, and gains ''[[summum bonum]]'' through a mystical mediation and communion with God. The hero rises from his initial state of ''[[tabula rasa]]'' to a mystical or direct experience of God after passing through the necessary natural experiences. The focal point of the story is that human reason, unaided by society and its conventions or by religion, can achieve scientific knowledge, preparing the way to the mystical or highest form of human knowledge.

Commonly translated as "The Self-Taught Philosopher" or "The Improvement of Human Reason", Ibn-Tufayl's story ''Hayy Ibn-Yaqzan'' inspired debates about autodidacticism in a range of historical fields from classical Islamic philosophy through Renaissance humanism and the European Enlightenment. In his book ''Reading Hayy Ibn-Yaqzan: a Cross-Cultural History of Autodidacticism,'' [[Avner Ben-Zaken]] showed how the text traveled from late medieval Andalusia to early modern Europe and demonstrated the intricate ways in which autodidacticism was contested in and adapted to diverse cultural settings.<ref name="ben-zaken"/>

Autodidacticism apparently intertwined with struggles over [[Sufism]] in twelfth-century Marrakesh; controversies about the role of philosophy in pedagogy in fourteenth-century [[Barcelona]]; quarrels concerning [[astrology]] in [[Renaissance]] [[Florence]] in which [[Pico della Mirandola]] pleads for autodidacticism against the strong authority of intellectual establishment notions of predestination; and debates pertaining to [[experimentalism]] in seventeenth-century Oxford. Pleas for autodidacticism echoed not only within close philosophical discussions; they surfaced in struggles for control between individuals and establishments.<ref name="ben-zaken" />

In the story of Black American self-education, [[Heather Andrea Williams]] presents a historical account to examine Black American's relationship to literacy during [[slavery]], the [[American Civil War|Civil War]] and the first decades of freedom.<ref>{{cite book|last=Williams|first=H.A.|title=Self-taught: Black American Education in slavery and freedom|year=2005|publisher=University of North Carolina Press|isbn=9780807829202|url=https://books.google.com/books?id=TiWSrlpTTTIC}}</ref> Many of the personal accounts tell of individuals who have had to teach themselves due to [[racial discrimination]] in education.
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