It's the way I study - to understand something by trying to work it out or, in other words, to understand something by creating it. Not creating it one hundred percent, of course; but taking a hint as to which direction to go but not remembering the details. These you work out for yourself.
Self-education is, I firmly believe, the only kind of education there is.
One of the brilliant things I realised after I'd left school is that there are so many ways you can learn. I do this best on the job.
I've never been a big believer in formal education.
I always believe that a person can learn so much by just jumping into something and trying to do it rather than having someone else teach you everything.
I didn't live at school, I lived where I could and studied what I enjoyed studying. I took what I wanted from that education but was making my first record at the same time. I don't know anyone from school. I was just leading a different life. I was really interested in writing and other things.
I educated myself. To me, school was boring.
I'm all self-taught. I never had a teacher. Even for English, and French, and German, I hardly went to school.
The essence of education is not to transfer knowledge; it is to guide the learning process, to put responsibility for study in the student's own hands...[and] place people on their own path of discovery and invention.
Actually, all education is self-education. A teacher is only a guide, to point out the way, and no school, no matter how excellent, can give you education. What you receive is like the outlines in a child’s coloring book. You must fill in the colors yourself.
Being homeschooled for half of my life allowed me to choose my own curriculum and find things I really enjoy, and that's kind of inspired me. I've always been intrigued in or interested in the topics I've been covering.
My older brother bought textbooks and was able to teach himself enough to go to college. When I was 16, he returned and told me to do the same thing.
Four years was enough of Harvard. I still had a lot to learn, but had been given the liberating notion that now I could teach myself.
Don't get me wrong: school is good and all, but school is way too slow for me. Like, super slow. So I didn't want to go. I wanted to learn on my own with real life experiences.
Self-study, in a sense of learning by yourself without anybody teaching you anything, has an enormous value.
I studied art history and philosophy and took economics and political science classes. I just took whatever I wanted and I didn't worry about grades and I read and learned a lot, and I didn't have much of a social life, so it was deeply absorbing.
School is not for me. I'm volatile and hate being told what to do.
My parents would say to me, 'You can teach yourself anything better than someone else can teach it to you.' That was the whole ethos of my family.
Learning in our family was entirely self-directed.
I never let schooling interfere with my education.
I taught myself more in the library than school taught me.
When I say 'homeschooled,' I was homeschooled for, like, two years, and then we just stopped. It was me and my parents, and they'd give me homework and stuff like that, but then one day, they just stopped.
I found university a little dispiriting. I thought I would enter the great halls of Plato, but instead I entered the halls of an intellectual sausage factory. I wanted to do something not on the main course, and chose the environment.
I needed to really pursue music and learn what I needed to learn on my own by getting in and doing it, not by reading a book about it.
Whatever education I got was from experience and reading. But I also realize I wouldn't pass my friend's sixth-grade class.
