Autonomous Learning. Successful language learning entails learner motivation, cooperation and empathy. This approach places emphasis on learner development.
If you want to improve, be content to be thought foolish and stupid with regard to external things. Don’t wish to be thought to know anything; and even if you appear to be somebody important to others, distrust yourself. For, it is difficult to both keep your faculty of choice in a state conformable to nature, and at the same time acquire external things. But while you are careful about the one, you must of necessity neglect the other.
Epictetus
Lack of judgment is precisely what is called stupidity, and there is absolutely no remedy for this defect. A dull and limited brain, lacking nothing except a suitable measure of intellect and precision in its concepts, can certainly be trained through study, even to the point of achieving erudition. However, since judgment is usually also lacking in such cases, one not infrequently encounters highly erudite men who, in the use of their knowledge, often reveal this incurable defect.
Immanuel Kant
Education is what remains after one has forgotten what one has learned in school.
Albert Einstein (Autonomous Learning)
Governments want efficient technicians, not human beings, because human beings become dangerous to governments – and to organized religions as well. That is why governments and religious organizations seek to control education.
Jiddu Krishnamurti
School has been very useful to me, in fact, observing the imbecility of my teachers, I have become a scholar of stupidity.
Carl William Brown
Real education must ultimately be limited to men who insist on knowing. The rest is mere sheep-herding.
Ezra Pound
Many who are self-taught far excel the doctors, masters, and bachelors of the most renowned universities.
Ludwig von Mises
There is nothing outside of yourself that can ever enable you to get better, stronger, richer, quicker, or smarter. Everything is within. Everything exists. Seek nothing outside of yourself.
Miyamoto Musashi The Book of Five Rings
Learn why the world wags and what wags it. That is the only thing which the mind can never exhaust, never alienate, never be tortured by, never fear or distrust, and never dream of regretting. Learning is the only thing for you. Look what a lot of things there are to learn.
T.H. White, The Once and Future King
Knowledge is not free. You have to pay attention.
R. Feynman
It is not so very important for a person to learn facts. For that he does not really need a college. He can learn them from books. The value of an education [at an institution] is not the learning of many facts but the training of the mind to think something that cannot be learned from textbooks.
Albert Einstein
No one is going to give you the education you need to overthrow them. Nobody is going to teach you your true history, teach you your true heroes, if they know that that knowledge will help set you free.
Assata Shakur
When the student is ready the teacher appears. When the student is truly ready, the teacher disappears.
Lao Tzu
Surely education has no meaning unless it helps you understand the vast experience of life with all its subtleties, with its extraordinary beauty, its sorrows and joys.
Jiddu Krishnamurti
Education means development of the mind so that it will work for you and not against you. All education is self-acquired because no one can educate another.
Napoleon Hill
Not ignorance, but ignorance of ignorance, is the death of knowledge.
Alfred North Whitehead
Day by day, what you think and what you do is who you become.
Heraclitus
The noblest pleasure is the joy of understanding.
Leonardo da Vinci
You cannot teach a man anything, you can only help him find it within himself.
Galileo Galilei
Your knowledge is far more important than your degree.
Paul Dirac
Properly, we should read for power. Man reading should be man intensely alive. The book should be a ball of light in one’s hand.
Ezra Pound
My education was neglected, yet I was passionately fond of reading.
Mary Shelley
The whole educational and professional training system is a very elaborate filter, which just weeds out people who are too independent, and who think for themselves, and who don’t know how to be submissive, and so on, because they’re dysfunctional to the institutions.
Noam Chomsky
There is no end to education. It is not that you read a book, pass an examination, and finish with education. The whole of life, from the moment you are born to the moment you die, is a process of learning.
Jiddu Krishnamurti
Some people acquire an education without going to college, while others gain it after graduation.
Mark Twain
The mind is sharper and keener in seclusion and uninterrupted solitude. No big laboratory is needed in which to think. Originality thrives in seclusion free of outside influences beating upon us to cripple the creative mind.
Nikola Tesla
Learning never exhausts the mind.
Leonardo da Vinci
Education’s purpose is to replace an empty mind with an open one.
Malcolm S. Forbes
Education consists mainly in what we have unlearned.
Mark Twain
It is well to read everything of something, and something of everything.
Lord Henry P. Brougham
Education must not only be the stupid learning of facts through rote methods, but also the training of mind to think starting from every kind of event. So take your opportunities to improve your knowledge of the world practicing some good eclectic strategies.
Carl William Brown
Education is an admirable thing, but it is well to remember from time to time that nothing that is worth knowing can be taught.
Oscar Wilde
Ignorance, the root and stem of all evil.
Plato
All schools, all colleges, have two great functions: to confer, and to conceal valuable knowledge.
Mark Twain
Education… has produced a vast population able to read but unable to distinguish what is worth reading, an easy prey to sensations and cheap appeals.
G. M. Trevelyan
Nothing is more securely lodged than the ignorance of the experts.
Friedrich August von Hayek
After all manner of professors have done their best for us, the place we are to get knowledge is in books. The true university of these days is a collection of books.
Thomas Carlyle
Intelligence is the capacity to perceive the essential, the what is; and to awaken this capacity, in oneself and in others, is education.
Jiddu Krishnamurti
I’ve never let my school interfere with my education.
Mark Twain
The best effect of any book, is that it excites the reader to self-activity.
Thomas Carlyle
The man who does not read good books has no advantage over the man who cannot read them.
Mark Twain
The whole educational and professional training system is a very elaborate filter, which just weeds out people who are too independent, and who think for themselves, and who don’t know how to be submissive, and so on – because they’re dysfunctional to the institutions.
Noam Chomsky
School can provide you an education and university can give you a culture, but self-knowledge and self-learning can help you to make a fortune.
Carl William Brown
Education is the ability to listen to almost anything without losing your temper or your self-confidence.
Robert Frost
There is no end to education. It is not that you read a book, pass an examination, and finish with education. The whole of life, from the moment you are born to the moment you die, is a process of learning.
Jiddu Krishnamurti
The illiterate of the future will not be the person who cannot read. It will be the person who has not learned how to learn.
Mark Twain
I have come to discover through earnest personal experience and dedicated learning that ultimately the greatest help is self-help; that there is no other help but self-help – doing one’s best, dedicating oneself wholeheartedly to a given task, which happens to have no end but is an on-going process.
Bruce Lee
Self-education is, I firmly believe, the only kind of education there is.
Isaac Asimov (1920-1992, Russian-born American author)
Everybody who is incapable of learning has taken to teaching.
Oscar Wilde
To understand life is to understand ourselves, and that is both the beginning and the end of education.
Jiddu Krishnamurti
He was really brilliant, clever and had a lot of imagination too, but unfortunately he was a donkey and thinking of being a horse wasn’t enough.
Carl William Brown
God made the Idiot for practice, and then He made the School Board.
Mark Twain
In England … education produces no effect whatsoever. If it did, it would prove a serious danger to the upper classes, and would probably lead to acts of violence in Grosvenor Square.
Oscar Wilde
The best education consists in immunizing people against systematic attempts at education.
Paul Kark Feyerabend
The first thing a student should understand to have success is that of becoming a self-taught man.
Carl William Brown
Education is the ability to listen to almost anything without losing your temper or your self-confidence.
Robert Frost
The more I read the more I figured out that only one conclusion is possible: languages cannot be taught, they can only be learned. Everything turns around the learner and his/her passion.
Carl William Brown
Art is not to be taught in Academies. It is what one looks at, not what one listens to, that makes the artist. The real schools should be the streets.
Oscar Wilde
The ideas of economists and political philosophers, both when they are right and when they are wrong, are more powerful than is commonly understood. Indeed the world is ruled by little else. Practical men, who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influences, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist. Madmen in authority, who hear voices in the air, are distilling their frenzy from some academic scribbler of a few years back.
John Maynard Keynes
A goal is not always meant to be reached, it often serves simply as something to aim at.
Bruce Lee
Education: the inculcation of the incomprehensible into the indifferent by the incompetent.
John Maynard Keynes
The psychic task which a person can and must set for himself is not to feel secure, but to be able to tolerate insecurity.
Erich Fromm
There is no such thing as ”the Queen’s English.” The property has gone into the hands of a joint stock company and we own the bulk of the shares!
Mark Twain
Children have a natural antipathy to books- handicraft should be the basis of education. Boys and girls should be taught to use their hands to make something, and they would be less apt to destroy and be mischievous.
Oscar Wilde
The best education consists in immunizing people against systematic attempts at education.
Paul Kark Feyerabend
Finally, Julio mentions the importance of making the language part of your life. Just as a boy learning how to play soccer would go out in the streets to play with his buddies, language learning shouldn’t be confined to your bedroom or classroom. Go out and have fun with it!
Julio César
Genius lasts longer than Beauty. That accounts for the fact that we all take such pains to over-educate ourselves.
Oscar Wilde
As Mark Twain once remarked, “The Best Education Happens outside the Classroom” which means that self learning that takes place outside the formal channels can be both informative as well as educational. To explain, self-learning ensures that learners learn outside the formal systems thereby giving them more flexibility and freedom to explore new avenues of learning.
Further, the fact that self learning is technologically enabled means that educational methods that are not usually the methods in classroom-based teaching can be made available to the learners thereby enhancing the value of such learning.
Successful language learning entails learner motivation, cooperation and empathy. Naturally, this approach places emphasis on learner development. There are a number of stages in the learner development process. The uppermost stages include raising language awareness (how learners can contribute to their own learning), changing learning strategies (self-monitoring, responding to peers, etc.), and, finally, assuming responsibility for their own learning. The last stage implies transferring some traditional teacher’s roles to learners which allows them to become more independent. (Kavaliauskiene, 2002)
It is advisable, however, instead of prompting the right answer to give learners some tips that might help them produce the correct answer. Usually someone in class does.
At lower levels, students might lack self-confidence to use English. If learners feel like using their first language, do not discourage them. Let students become familiar with activity and feel comfortable and secure.
Alternatives
This activity can be used for peer-checking of progress tests administered by teachers. Having administered a few versions (to avoid cheating) of progress tests, ask students to exchange their worksheets, correct their peer’s work and allow them to grade it. Learners enjoy playing teachers!
Next, let students discuss their performance by working in pairs or small groups. The teacher’s role is to monitor pairs’ work and give advice if necessary.
Useful Tip
Avoid ‘denouncing’ students for making mistakes. The damage to a student’s reputation might be irreparable. Individual counseling is preferable.
Student-produced Tests LEVEL: elementary & above
OBJECTIVES: peer-assessment, self-assessment, producing materials, reflection on usage, interaction, recycling grammar/vocabulary
TARGET LANGUAGE: vocabulary, grammar, word-building, matching words& definitions
MATERIALS: handouts, worksheets, transparencies from
web-based, authentic or textbook materials
IMPLEMENTATION
PROCEDURE: work in pairs / small groups / whole class discussion
TIME LIMIT: flexible
The choice of materials that students can use for producing tests for their peers depends on their level. Higher level students are apt to create a variety of exercises (word-building, gap-filling, language in use, matching words and definitions) and use authentic materials. Lower level students prefer to produce grammar exercises similar to ones in their textbooks.
For students, making their own tests is an extremely motivating activity, which also has an element of self-study and self-assessment. Learners are bound to reflect on the items they have chosen for testing
In class, learners hand out worksheets to their peers, set a time limit and provide assistance if needed. The outcome is discussed either between groups or in the whole class.
The teacher’s role is to monitor learners’ activities in pairs or small groups unobtrusively. Intervention is unnecessary unless learners need assistance.
Useful Tip
It is advisable to check and correct mistakes on the learners’ worksheets before they are handed out to their peers.
Tests might be presented on transparencies and implemented as a whole class activity (provided an overhead projector is available in the classroom).
Reference
Kavaliauskiene, G. Three Activities to Promote Learner’s Autonomy. The Internet TESL Journal. Vol. VIII, No. 7, July 2002. http://iteslj.org/Techniques/Kavaliauskiene-Autonomy/
http://www.apa.org/education/k12/learners.aspx
Further pragmatic resources for language and cultural learning:
Blog Links and resources, a collection of very useful, famous and interesting websites, selected by our blog experts to help you improve your knowledge and usage of the Internet.
https://www.worldhistory.org World History Encyclopedia (formerly Ancient History Encyclopedia) is a reputable, non-profit online resource dedicated to improving history education worldwide. It offers peer-reviewed articles, timelines, and educational resources covering ancient, medieval, and modern history, making it a reliable source for students, teachers, and enthusiasts. Key Aspects of World History Encyclopedia:Reliability & Credibility: All content is curated, written by experts, and editorially reviewed before publication.Recommendation: Recommended by organizations such as Oxford University, School Library Journal, and MERLOT. Focus: While initially focused on ancient history, it covers a wide range of global history topics, emphasizing, but not limited to, ancient, medieval, and early modern periods. Non-Profit Mission: Founded in 2009, the organization seeks to provide free history education to everyone worldwide. Features: The site includes interactive maps, audio articles, videos, and academic resources.AI Integration: The site uses AI to improve search functions but focuses on human-verified, expert-written content.
https://core.ac.uk/ CORE (COnnecting REpositories) is the world’s largest aggregator of open-access research papers, operated by The Open University in the UK. It indexes millions of articles from repositories and journals worldwide, offering free, full-text access for researchers, developers, and the public.Key aspects of core.ac.uk include:Mission: To aggregate worldwide research and provide free, unrestricted access to it.Services: Offers a CORE Discovery extension to find open access versions of paywalled papers, along with APIs and datasets for researchers.Impact: Aims to increase the visibility and citation of open repository content, with studies showing it can increase repository downloads.Governance: It is a not-for-profit, community-governed service.It is highly regarded for its comprehensive coverage of open-access literature, often finding more free content than other discovery systems.
https://www.base-search.net/ BASE is one of the world’s most voluminous search engines especially for academic web resources. The index contains more than 400 million records from more than 12,000 content providers. You can access the full texts of about 60% of the indexed records for free (Open Access). BASE is operated by Bielefeld University Library. We are indexing the metadata of all kinds of academically relevant resources – journals, institutional repositories, digital collections etc. – which provide an OAI interface and use OAI-PMH for providing their contents (see our Golden Rules for Repository Managers). The index is continuously enhanced by integrating further sources / content provider (Become a content provider). We are working on several new features like a claiming service for authors within the ORCID DE project.
https://www.cambridge.org/elt/blog/2021/01/29/learner-autonomy/ Learner autonomy is the idea of learners developing skills for learning outside of the classroom, or without constant instruction. Encouraging learner autonomy involves playing an active role in their learning, making decisions about their learning, and reflecting and evaluating their learning. The Cambridge Life Competencies Framework includes Learning to Learn, which deals with the skills necessary to become a more autonomous learner of English, as well as study skills more generally. Techniques for encouraging learner autonomy include note-taking and vocabulary, flashcards, spaced repetition and example sentences, and social media settings, graded readers and switching off subtitles.
https://www.openculture.com/ Open Culture is a prominent educational and cultural website founded in 2006 that curates high-quality, free resources for lifelong learners worldwide. It centralizes scattered web content, offering access to more than 1,700 free online courses from Universities, movies, audiobooks, ebooks, and language lessons. It is widely considered a valuable, free repository for educational media. Take online courses from the world’s top universities for free.
https://www.mindluster.com Mind Luster offers 300,000 online courses and MOOCs with free certificates. The platform covers major subject areas including programming, business, graphic design, languages, computer science, digital marketing, and professional skills. The platform aims to serve both individual learners and companies seeking employee training. Users can access course content 24/7, learn at their own pace, and participate in community discussions.
https://www.docsity.com Founded in 2010 Docsity has grown from an Italian student note-sharing platform into a worldwide educational powerhouse with over 20 million registered users. The platform offers study documents, video courses, and quizzes in nine languages including English, French, Spanish, and German. Students access over 3 million study documents through a points-based system. Users earn free download points by contributing content, while premium subscribers get immediate access to unlimited materials and AI features.
https://www.schoolofthought.org/ The purpose of the School of Thought is to help us question all schools of thought. We are a non profit dedicated to promoting critical thinking, reason and understanding by providing free Creative Commons educational materials using world’s best practice design and code.
https://freelearninglist.org/ The best free edu-things on the internet, ranked in order of amazingness, and neatly categorized. The project is run by The School of Thought, a non-profit organization focused on teaching critical thinking rather than prescriptive content. The purpose of the School of Thought is to help us question all schools of thought. We are a non profit dedicated to promoting critical thinking, reason and understanding by providing free Creative Commons educational materials using world’s best practice design and code.
https://yourlogicalfallacyis.com/ A logical fallacy is a flaw in reasoning. Logical fallacies are like tricks or illusions of thought, and they’re often very sneakily used by politicians and the media to fool people. Don’t be fooled! This website has been designed to help you identify and call out dodgy logic wherever it may raise its ugly, incoherent head. The site’s proof-of-concept project “yourfallacy.is” has reached over 10 million unique visitors and is used in thousands of schools. Professor Steven Pinker cited this project in his book “Enlightenment Now”, describing it as “an excellent summary of common fallacies”.
https://www.theodinproject.com/ The Odin Project empowers aspiring web developers to learn together for free. The Odin Project is a free, open-source, and self-paced, full-stack web development curriculum. It teaches coding through hands-on, project-based learning, guiding users from beginner to job-ready by building real-world applications using modern technologies like Ruby on Rails or JavaScript/Node.js. Maintained by volunteers, it is continuously updated to reflect current industry standards. It provides a large Discord community for help and collaboration. It teaches you to use real developer tools early on, including Linux/WSL2.
https://www.languageguide.org/ LanguageGuide.org is a free, non-profit educational website and app designed for language learning, featuring audio-integrated visual resources and interactive exercises. It focuses on building vocabulary, pronunciation, and foundational grammar through thematic pictorial guides, covering languages like English, Spanish, French, German, and more. Nearly all content includes sound, providing clear, distinct audio from native speakers. Organizes vocabulary into thematic categories like numbers, body parts, and daily life items. As a registered non-profit organization, the platform aims to be free and ad-free. Suitable for beginners and, according to, those with pre-intermediate levels of knowledge, making it a valuable tool for learning basic communication skills.
https://roadmap.sh/ roadmap.sh is a community effort to create roadmaps, guides and other educational content to help guide developers in picking up a path and guide their learnings. Community created roadmaps, guides and articles to help developers grow in their career. It is the 7th most starred opensource project on GitHub and gets visited by hundreds of thousands of developers every month. We also have newsletter with 150,000+ developers. All the roadmaps are created and reviewed by community and several subject matter experts. It’s a FREE, open-source platform offering visual learning paths for tech careers.
https://www.codecademy.com/ Codecademy is a popular interactive online platform for learning to code, featuring in-browser, hands-on coding exercises with immediate feedback. It covers various languages and tech topics, offering both free lessons and a paid “Pro” tier ($39.99/month) that includes career paths, portfolio projects, and certification. Users type code directly into the browser to learn syntax and receive instant feedback, making it ideal for beginners. Covers 12+ languages including Python, SQL, Java, and JavaScript/HTML/CSS for web development. Access to career paths (e.g., Data Scientist, Front-End Engineer), quizzes, and real-world projects. Includes forums, Discord channels, and in-person meetups. The CodecademyGo app allows for reviewing concepts, practicing syntax, and reading articles on the go.
About this topic you can also read:
