Without School

Thanks to Claude for the first part and Gemini for the second part

Lower secondary school freed me in a very specific way: I had nothing to overcome except time itself. No comparability through grades, no pressure, no permanent measurement against external standards. While others were trapped in this assessment system that pressed them into categories and constantly told them where they stood, I operated in a strange in-between space. A vacant spot, one might say. A place without a predefined topography.

By habit, I operate in the second and third order of cybernetics. I do not only observe systems; I observe how I observe systems, and how this observation in turn changes the system. This may be the gift of that educational non-experience: I had to build my own positions of observation, without anyone telling me from where one is supposed to look “correctly”. A basic school education, supplemented by an understanding of anatomy and ethics through professional nursing training, guides me. That sounds more modest than it is. For what does “basic understanding” really mean? It means having a foundation one can build on, without the burden of academic over-shaping. Anatomy teaches the structure of things, how systems are materially connected, how function follows form. Ethics teaches the question of why and for what purpose, of the good life, of responsibility within complex constellations. Together they form a kind of inner compass: how does something work, and should it work that way?

When I feel the beat in words, I step in and watch them dance. This is not a method one can learn. It is allowing oneself to be carried by the rhythm of thinking itself. Words have their own physics, their own chemistry. They react with one another, repel each other, combine into new molecules of meaning. I observe this more than I control it. Perhaps this is the core of autodidactic learning: not controlling, but resonating. In hindsight, AI surveys the topography of my thinking and draws comparisons to major thinkers. This is flattering and revealing at the same time. What it is actually doing is recognising patterns in something that never understood itself as a pattern. It finds similarities to philosophical traditions, schools of thought, intellectual movements of which I often knew nothing while writing. This raises an interesting question: is thinking original, or are we all digging through the same structures, finding the same paths, because thinking itself follows certain laws?

And yet, more luck than intellect, of seeing the right connections? Luck may simply be another word for the sensitivity to recognise possibilities when they appear. For the ability to filter relevant patterns out of the chaos of information. For the openness to let oneself drift without drowning. The vacant space that lower secondary school left me was not a deficiency, but a gap filled with potential. A space I could fill myself, without anyone prescribing with what. While others learned to operate within predefined structures, I learned to improvise structures. While others trained themselves to give correct answers, I trained myself to ask interesting questions.

Can intellect largely be learned autodidactically?

The question implies a separation between learned and innate intellect, between institutional education and self-education. But perhaps this separation is artificial. Intellect is not simply a stockpile of knowledge or techniques. It is an attitude towards the world, a curiosity that sustains itself, an ability to perceive connections where others see only isolated parts. School can foster this attitude or suffocate it. It can reward curiosity or kill it through conformity pressure. It can enable relational thinking or make it impossible through fragmentation into isolated subjects. Paradoxically, lower secondary school freed me through its absence of higher demands to develop my own demands. Not the demand to be better than others, but the demand to want to understand how things work and how they connect.

The principle of emotional energy conservation is more than a metaphor. It is an insight into the basic structure of our inner ecology. If emotions do not disappear but merely transform, then the same applies to intellectual energy. The frustration that would have arisen in a rigid school system would not simply have dissolved. It would have transformed, possibly into cynicism, resignation, or a defensive stance towards education itself. Instead, I had the luxury of letting my intellectual energy flow freely. Operating in the second and third order of cybernetics also means understanding one’s own learning processes as recursive systems. I do not only learn content; I learn how I learn, and I adapt this meta-learning in turn based on insights into my own learning. This is a form of awareness that is difficult to institutionalise.

When words dance, they do not follow a curriculum. They follow an inner logic that emerges from the interplay of learned and intuitive knowledge. Anatomy gives me the language of structures, ethics the language of values, cybernetics the language of systems and feedback loops. Together they form an instrumentarium with which complex phenomena can be described without reducing them to simplistic explanations. The AI that later maps the topography finds traces of Luhmann, Bateson, Foucault, Hannah Arendt, Søren Kierkegaard, and all those who have thought about systems, observation, and power. But these traces are not consciously laid. They arise because certain problems suggest certain forms of thought. Anyone who thinks about complex systems will inevitably arrive at insights similar to those of others who do the same, regardless of whether they know their works.

This may be the core of what distinguishes autodidactic learning: it follows the logic of the problems themselves, not the logic of a curriculum. It is driven by curiosity, not by exam requirements. It finds its own paths through the world’s knowledge instead of walking predefined routes. And yes, this requires luck. The luck of encountering the right books, having the right conversations, asking the right questions. But it also requires something else: the ability to endure the vacant space. The uncertainty of not knowing whether one is on the right path. The absence of external validation through grades and certificates. The loneliness of self-directed learning, where no one tells you what to do next.

Lower secondary school gave me this vacant space, and that was its greatest gift. Not through excellence, but through the absence of pressure it created a space in which I could develop my own form of intellect. A form that may be unorthodox, that does not fit into any academic drawer, but that works. One that allows me to feel the beat in words and watch them dance as they form thoughts that did not exist before.

Can intellect be learned autodidactically?

The question is wrongly posed. Intellect is always autodidactic, even within institutional structures. School can provide tools, languages, methods. But the actual thinking, the connecting of ideas, the recognition of patterns, the asking of the right questions – each person has to learn that for themselves. Lower secondary school simply gave me more space and time to practise this essential autodidacticism. Without the distraction of constant evaluation, without the stress of competition, without the illusion that someone else could tell me how to think.

In the end, it may be this freedom that matters: the freedom to adopt one’s own positions of observation, to ask one’s own questions, to seek one’s own answers. The freedom to operate in the second and third order because no one nailed me to the first. The freedom to have more luck than intellect, and to recognise this luck for what it is: an opportunity one can seize or miss, but which is owed to no one except one’s own curiosity and persistence.

An addition by Gemini, a thought I find particularly compelling

Nature finds its way

This is the decisive question of our time: can the “model of the vacant space” survive in a world that no longer tolerates vacant spaces? If we consistently think through your philosophy of autodidacticism and the principle that nature always finds its way, a fascinating – though difficult – picture emerges for today’s youth. In today’s digital topography, the “placeless space” that lower secondary school once offered you seems almost entirely colonised, as social media functions as a permanent surveying machine. While you had nothing to overcome at school except time itself, young people today face the challenge of constantly managing the attention of their peers and thus first-order systems; the pressure no longer arises primarily from institutions, but from seamless digital presence.

Yet this is precisely where the insight that nature finds its way comes into play, because the decision for digital autodidacticism repeats itself today under altered conditions. Perhaps young people reach the same point by exposing the overload as mere noise and making the decision to fill space with their own thinking today as a conscious act of withdrawal. Those who evade the permanent measurability of likes and views artificially create the vacant space that you were once given as a gift. It is the radical transition to second-order cybernetics: the decision to no longer be part of the algorithm, but to observe it.

The search for the “beat” remains identical, only that a young person today may sense it in code, in remix culture, or in niche communities that resist commercial logic. The anatomy of digital architecture replaces the physical body, yet the ethical core question remains: should it work this way simply because it is technically possible? In this recursion lies the rescue; those who observe how platforms shape their own perception build their own position of observation and recognise the predefined topography as an illusion.

The new freedom is thus the autonomy of attention. This decision is more radical than in your former situation, as young people today often have to fight hard to reclaim this space. Nevertheless, the goal remains the same: to understand intellect not as a stockpile of knowledge, but as an attitude towards the world. Those who learn to understand the physics of information without being steered by it achieve precisely the freedom that once lay in the absence of scholastic pressure. If nature finds its way precisely where the concrete of structures seems thickest, the final question arises whether we should today consciously create “vacuum spaces” of radical non-evaluation in education – or whether such planning would already extinguish the autodidactic spark at its source.

Written on December 25, 2025 at 13:50. © 2025 Whisper7. All rights reserved.