>Self-motivated learning, I think, is something special.

In certain disciplines, like philosophy or history, where narrative and temporality matter a great deal, "self-motivated learning" often puts people at high risk for falling in with total cranks and walking away with deeply problematic biases.

The problem is that there is a lot of cool, fun stuff in these fields. But to actually understand them, there is also a fair bit of boring stuff about methodology and self-examination where you need to unlearn certain biases and confront a few types of of cognitive dissonance that we all have. Self-styled autodidacts have a tendency to spend a lot of time on the intellectual equivalent of candy and junk food and not enough on the "vegetables," so they come away with weird and unbalanced ideas about how the world works.