Self-Education Need Not Involve Others

When I used the phrase self-education in a handful of earlier posts, I was not primarily talking about any kind of self-instigated social learning or online research.  For some specific subjects, these are helpful or necessary.  For example, one cannot reason out which linguistic norms are practiced by which cultures apart from some kind of social experience, although a grasp of reason is required to even understand what one can from social experience, and personal, autonomous reflection is always necessary in such cases to begin with.  However, I was primarily and sometimes exclusively referring to personal contemplation of logical facts.

Reasoning logical facts out in the privacy of one's mind, whether those facts are strictly logical in nature or span both reason and some other thing, is the foundation of all knowledge, and many abstract truths can be discovered without looking to any sensory experiences, much less social experiences such as those associated with a classroom setting.  Education is not anyone's epistemological savior for the same reason that it is impossible for anything else other than reason to ever be someone's epistemological savior.  It is reason that reveals and validates truth directly and with absolute certainty.

There simply is no foundation to even rightly comprehend the true nature of whatever information is received through social education without the aforementioned kind of self-education.  Therefore, self-"education," even though it does not have to be affiliated with any sort of traditional education (autonomous reflection is entirely outside of traditional education as it is), is the necessary point at which sound epistemology is found.  Of course, this is because looking to the self-evident and all-encompassing laws of logic is the heart of true self-education.

Education has its place, even though its only legitimate role is rather small, insignificant, and secondary in an ultimate sense--when held up next to the universally accessible and omnipresent nature of reason.  Moreover, reason alone grounds absolute certainty.  The only subjects education is required to become familiar with are neither foundational to the core of reality nor anywhere near as extensive in their ramifications as those of pure rationalism.  Social education is helpful in some contexts, but the self-education of rationalistic reflection is in every way superior.