Learning for the self, not for school grades, not due to coercion!! Your understanding of the world would expand greatly, especially if you combine it with critical thinking, you will be able to develop your worldview in your own hands!!
1. You can learn (almost) whenever you want, provided you are not asleep!
2. You can learn (almost) whatever you want, provided it's not secret
information!
3. There is no need to finish it all quickly. And if you hate it, you
can just stop at any time guilt-free! You still have the knowledge so
far! Unlike school, you don't have to deal with the sunk
cost fallacy (once you do a subject, if you switch, you will have to
redo the whole year, which costs lots of money and time, which means it might
be better to stay)
4. No technology restriction
5. No time pressure
6. No peer pressure
7. No toxic zero-sum gamenship
8. No syllabus restricting content
9. No grades causing the overjustification
effect
10. Can refill liquid bottles without permission
11. No sitting in a room bored
12. Can go out and eat whenever needed
13. Toilet use without permission (basic human right)
14. No noise disruption from classmates or teachers
15. Wake up and sleep
whenever needed
16. Free use of Wikipedia or YouTube for learning material.
1. It may be hard to do. Paradoxically, your intrinsic motivation to
learn may not be that strong. Of course, it's due to school
itself.
2. It does consume lots of mental working memory, so it might cause
fatigue.
3. There will always be more information than you can remember, so you
will need to prioritize your learning material! Of course, this one is
also due to school itself, where even the most insignificant of
information can appear in exams, so it would require a bit of adaptation to
re-learn that not all information is important, and some can be safely
discarded!
4. I had to justify once to a classmate why I was learning for no
particular reason! Because I was following my Will!
5. In terms of meritocracy, universities and employers won't really
know. So pragmatically you will still have to do well
in public exams... yeah.
6. A sense of goallessness, from not having external goals, especially
with so much information on sites like Wikipedia, may confuse a person!
However, the logic is clear: Knowing something, even a bit, is better
than not bothering at all! There is little point in quitting just
because there is a lot of information; in fact, that is a blessing of
the accessibility of the Internet, as long as you see that it is not a
burden...
No deadlines - assume lazy. mass-apply parkinsons' law to all,
forgetting free learning is for the sake of your own benefit and
pleasure, not just optimization (School goes at such rates, you don't
wanna be in school, so it clearly is not sustainable for a happy
prolonged life)
If it had positive value, instead of avoiding the negative value of
punishment or stigma, naturally you would do free learning.
Assume no foundations - in fact, school is probably worse for this because they go at the same rate, and give you little energy after school to catch up. If you struggle with advanced physics concept wikipedia you can postpone for later and learn the fundamentals without any disruption.
No teacher - AI and YouTube and Wiki have already caught on. The problem here is that a teacher is just like a YT video; you can't pause it too, bc he has to deal with more than 10 people at once.
As the title suggests, you are free to do it if you want! At the very least, there is no omnipotent system forcing you to learn whatever they want, whenever they want, and graded however they want.