There IS a such thing as self-taught

I’ve always considered myself “self-taught” because I don’t have a formal education in design or development, it’s always been my hobby.  The other day I read that a developer/designer cannot be self taught because we’re always learning from each other and it made me question myself.  Is there a such thing as self taught?

Since most of my learning came from reading other peoples code and studying their pixels, I’d have to agree that a lot of what I know has been learned from others and that I never would have written HTML or CSS if I hadn’t seen it elsewhere.  But how is learning from each other any different from learning in an institution?  Whether your in a class room or your at home viewing the source of other people’s code, it’s still learning from somewhere but that’s not the point.

There is something special about this idea of being self taught, it doesn’t refer to where or how you get your information, it’s about the drive to learn without a teacher. I was not formally trained to write code, so I attribute this education to my own curiosity and persistence.  Everything I’ve done up to this point is my own,  it’s not more mine than it would be if I were trained in an institution.