Autodidacticism: The Walking Drum

The Walking Drum, A best seller from the pen of Louis L'amour, is a magnificent and accurate book in which the roots of renaissance glory grow from the barbarous conditions of the 12 century. This theme in the book requires a keener mind to see, for, if the reader goes into it unperceptive of the intellectual brilliance because all they want is to be amused by buff men with swords, and bad guys who always wear black, and models with 21 century tastes in makeup, then half the pages in the book will have no print on them. While this book is packed with romance and adventure, there is a lot to be gained that is beyond the entertainment value; namely, the autodidacticism that is portrayed by the main character, Mathurin Kerbouchard of Brittany and many of the people he chooses to associate with.

Education in Europe was held in the iron fist of the state. Unless you were a man of great means, power, and political connections, then it was hard to find any kind of teacher or tutor in the contemporary sense. One could turn to the church for an education or perhaps one could find an apprenticeship in some trade, otherwise, for an apodekteon (one must learn from others), no serious education was possible. If the whole of mankind were apodekteons, then no renaissance could have been possible because there would have been no expansion of knowledge. However, mankind has not been stagnant, but has grown and innovated and invented and inquired, and these improvements were not brought about by apodekteons, but by autodidacts like Mathurin Kerbouchard.

Without giving too much of the book away I hope, Marthurin, unlike the school boy today, did not go to his neighborhood elementary school; Rather he became a refugee as a youth, in fear of the tyrant, Baron de Tournemine who killed his mother. After going through various adventures Marthurin finds himself a scholar in Spain, basking in the glow of Saracen golden age education, where, no public education bureau regulated every minutia, but instead education was high quality and widely dispersed among the people; possible only because the culture of the people was distinctly auto didactical. 
It was in Spain that Marthurin learned his letters and became a schooler. He was passionate about scholarship, true, but he was also an outstanding athlete and warrior.

Later it was his skill as a warrior that he was invited to escort a train of traveling merchants, these merchants, like the Saracens, were shining points of autodidacticism, though not of the academic kind. It was the merchants that re-imagined the anatomy of nations, trade, information and news travel, and military arts. The merchants in the middle ages decentralized power from local lords to kings, to emperors, merchants tilted the balance of power by transferring  power to the city-state. Trade likewise was improved by these autodidactical businessmen. Trade in the middle ages was highly regulated and protectionist from trade guilds to antisemitism, and these merchants were able to cut through red tape and overcome petty differences. These merchants were also the harbingers of news and information, which is invaluable. Furthermore, merchants greatly advanced the military arts because they were frequently attacked and looted. They were the ones that changed hand-to-hand combat of sword and spear to the long range warfare of archery. This change was due to the fact that merchants did not fight because they were motivated by pride or plunder, but because they had to defined themselves and stay alive. 

All of these examples of autodiacticism can be found throughout The Walking Drum and even more. It's a great book full of not only thrill, but also information, history, and philosophy. The book breaths.