In this talk, Michael Strong, founder of expanseonline.co, argues that autodidacticism is a skill that can be taught rather than a rare innate talent. He frames reading as a "superpower" that, when mastered, enables individuals to navigate complex domains such as biology, cryptocurrency, law, and economics. Strong distinguishes between extensive reading (reading broadly and frequently) and intensive reading (deep, Socratic analysis of dense texts), drawing on the Great Books tradition of St. John’s College and Morton Adler’s "How to Read a Book." He critiques modern education for lowering textual difficulty, which limits students’ exposure to challenging material, and proposes exposing learners to real‑world dense documents (tax forms, legal contracts, scientific papers) to build fluency. Through a metacognitive Socratic framework—continually asking what one knows, doesn’t know, and needs to know—students develop laser‑sharp comprehension. Strong illustrates his method with personal anecdotes: collaborating with Nobel‑winning economist Gary Becker after minimal formal economics training, dissecting a biochemistry paper in eight hours, and practicing repeated slow readings of philosophy. He envisions assessments where learners are given unfamiliar, complex texts and must figure them out using provided resources, demonstrating true autodidactic capability. The talk concludes with a recruitment pitch for his program, inviting parents to enroll their children to become powerful self‑learners.
Chapters
Hello, I'm Michael Strong with expanseonline.co. I want to focus on how to develop the ability to be an autodidact, to learn on one's own. I believe some people think that autodidacticism is a rare ability that a few people have. The vast majority of people need schooling and training and yada yada yada. And certainly there are amazing autodidacts. Frederick Douglass famously learned to spell by challenging boys at the dock that he could spell better than they day, and he didn't know how to spell. It was illegal for slaves to learn to read and write, but he actually learned how to spell by means of losing lots of these bets. I think it was brilliant, and it shows the intensity of his desire to learn. And ultimately, he became an extraordinary master of the English language in spoken and written form. But I think that one can learn how to be an autodidact, and I'm going to talk a little bit about how one does that for now, just in the case of learning how to read difficult material and to internalize it and to understand the concepts in difficult material. And the reason I focused on reading is that reading is a superpower. Of course, it's possible to have wonderful careers and not be a reader. And yet, if one is a capable reader, biology class is easier, or reading biology books on one's own is easier. Say the cryptocurrency literature is easier if one's a capable reader, whereas not if one cannot read these things. The legal documents that are required in business are easier to read if one's a very capable reader. So the reason I focus on reading is because if one can develop the ability to read and understand difficult, conceptually dense materials— you know, biology, cryptocurrency, legal documents as a few random examples— one is substantially empowered to act in the world. One still may need, say, entrepreneurial or creative or engineering skills, coding skills, whatever. Yep. And the ability to read and understand difficult material is very powerful. So I look at kind of two aspects of reading. One is extensive reading, one is intensive. Extensively, read as much as you can. I tell young people, no such thing as too much reading. If I find a student who's spontaneously a real reader, I regard education is 80% solved right there. But intensive reading— I'm in the tradition of Morton Adler's How to Read a Book. We read and think and talk about dense texts. This goes into the Socratic practice element of expanseonline.co. It's a lineage descendant of the Great Books Program of St. John's College at Santa Fe and Annapolis. And by means of reading and discussing conceptually dense texts, Students learn how to break apart paragraphs and sentences. I've had English teachers say doing this is the first time they understood the importance of semicolons versus colons. One is analyzing the structure of texts that are non-obvious. My ideal text to read— this is why philosophy and poetry are especially good— is so difficult that no student in the class can understand it. I think one of, uh, the reasons we've seen a decline in SAT verbal scores over the years, and there's literature on this, an academic literature, is that gradually the belief came to be that we needed to establish grade-level textbooks that were accessible to all the students. But as a consequence, students rarely read above their grade level. Everything they encountered in school was designed at grade level, and then grade level declined, and so the prose difficulty declined. As a consequence, very few students run into conceptually challenging material. Often when I begin introducing students to this through, say, philosophy or poetry, they'll complain, why do we have to read such difficult material? And I'll give them, say, a page of IRS 1040 tax instructions or a legal contract or a page from a scientific paper and say, would they prefer to read something like this? Occasionally in the science they do, but they never want to read a contract or IRS instructions. So I expose them to the fact that there are conceptually difficult, complex materials in the real world. And then I explain to them that they'll be incredibly empowered if they learn how to read this stuff. And so read then is not just reading in terms of putting one's eyes on words and sentences and paragraphs. Reading becomes entering the conceptual universe of an alien document and figuring out how these things work, figuring out words by context, figuring out the logical structure of a document. The way in which I would say I developed it at St. John's was really by means of encountering very difficult philosophy with no preparation. St. John's discourages any sort of secondary material. So one is simply diving in with, Aristotle and Hegel and Kant, and later on Einstein's 1905 paper on special relativity. And one is expected to figure this stuff out with the proviso that in the Socratic dialogue, you'll hear other perspectives. And if one is not prepared adequately, class is really boring. On the other hand, if one has prepared adequately to participate in the conversation, class is really exciting. So there's a built-in intrinsic motive to learn to understand these conceptual frameworks. And often I would find myself reading things 3 times slowly with great difficulty. Young people today never read something 3 times slowly with great difficulty. But that sort of pushing to try to make sense of a difficult world is crucial to developing the ability to understand on one's own. Of course, one needs to know how to, say, look up the right terms and find the right resources. But by means of thousands of hours of struggling and working to understand difficult texts, as well as the real-time conversations on those texts by one's peers, one develops a different kind of fluency. So the comparison that I make is say, with foreign language. That is, I develop in my schools an intellectual environment that is often as foreign to young people initially as is a foreign language. If I— I know a little bit of Spanish, but if I go into a Spanish-speaking environment, I am lost at first. But I know enough and remember enough and can look up enough that within, say, a week, I can start to make sense of things and kind of orient myself and gradually participate. 2 or 3 weeks, while by no means fluent, at least I'm kind of functional. And so similarly, initially when a child may enter our environment, some of them are shocked and afraid, some are overly confident and think they know when they don't, but they begin participating and they learn how to calibrate their understanding. Socrates famously, "I know what I don't know." The founder of St. John's College, Scott Buchanan, extended that to say, If I know what I know and I know what I don't know, then I can know what I should know. And once I know what I need to know in order to understand the whole, then I become a capable autodidact. Now, it may sound abstract, but I, when I read a difficult material and I read profusely in a very diverse range of academic literatures, I very quickly I'm able to pinpoint, okay, I understand this, I don't understand that, I need to know that. Sentence by sentence, paragraph by paragraph, concept by concept, with razor-like sharpness. And as a consequence of this highly attuned metacognitive Socratic apparatus, I'm able to work through extremely difficult papers in just about any literature. I'll just give you a couple of examples to show what I've been able to do with this. First, when— after I left St. John's, I entered the University of Chicago, and only after one or two economics classes there, I began working with Gary Becker, who later won a Nobel Prize, on my dissertation on ideas and culture as human capital. Obviously, autodidacticism is a form of human capital I'm very interested in, but I was working with him to understand a Beckerian framework for culture. To go to a very different example, and that was with only one or two economics courses. So mostly I got there by reading a ton of economics and understanding it. A different example, I once worked advising a biochemistry graduate class taught by a professor friend of mine. And he gave me a biochem paper that they were reading for Monday. And it took me 8 hours to read 4 pages because biochem is not my thing at all. I was able to understand the paper. When I got there, I realized the problem was that his students, they were silent. He was concerned nobody was talking. They did not understand the paper. They were good at solving problem sets for their biochem courses, but they were not accustomed to understanding an argument. And along with other sorts of experiences like this, I found that not only myself, but many people who have been in a program where they work to understand difficult conceptual material over and over and over again, get good at it. Hello, practice allows us to become better, especially if one uses a form of deliberate practice with respect to Socratic metacognitive analysis. What do I know? What do I don't know? What do I need to know? Always working for laser-like precision in one's understanding. Is it a conceptual matter? Is it a vocabulary matter? Are there prerequisites to understanding I need? Do I need to ask somebody, or can I look this up? Do I need more context in this paper, or should I focus in on this particular paragraph or sentence? This sort of Socratic metacognitive analysis, over time, I see it as a superpower in terms of developing the ability to be an autodidact. And I see the ability to learn new conceptual material on one's own and to learn how to understand anything as a superpower in the 21st century. Give you one more point. Phil Akiro, one of my favorite tutors at St. John's College, once said the ideal St. John's foreign language exam was one in which you didn't know what foreign language you'd have a test on. I go in for a test on Friday, it might be Mandarin, Swahili, Polish, whatever, but you'd be given a passage to translate and a lexicon for the words and grammar for understanding. And you would figure it out, just brute force, let's figure this out. Similarly, I see the ultimate final exam I'd love to see in my schools is one where you have no idea what you'll be tested on on Friday, but we'll give you the resources to figure it out. And whether it's a scientific paper, a tax document, mathematical treatise, foreign language text, whatever it is, show us by means of brute force that you can figure it out on your own. I think students who have that ability will be uniquely empowered, and I believe ultimately, though to greater and lesser extents, everybody has a much greater ability to become an autodidact in this sense than we see at present, precisely because the system at present trains people to be dependent on teachers and courses and external versions of an understanding as opposed to an internal analysis of when and how and how well I understand something. So I'm Michael Strong, founder of expanseonline.co, and if you want your child to be an amazing autodidact, please have him or her join us.
