Readers educated at English comprehensives in the 70's and 80's may find that this rings a few bells.
On the subject of autodidacticism, see this excellent piece by Pierre Bourdieu, excerpted at the riotously eclectic "Autodidact Project".
Because he has not acquired his culture in the legitimate order established by the educational system, the autodidact constantly betrays, by his very anxiety about the right classification, the arbitrariness of his classifications and therefore of his knowledge--a collection of unstrung pearls, accumulated in the course of an uncharted exploration, unchecked by the institutionalized, standardized stages and obstacles, the curricula and progressions which make scholastic culture a ranked and ranking set of interdependent levels and forms of knowledge.
Also, the figure of the Autodidact in Sartre's Nausea. For Sartre, the autodidact is a palpably gross, awkward figure. His existence is solitary (because his pursuits go unrecognised/ unvalued) and (in every sense) misguided. He is his own master – where the suggestion of onanism is unmistakable. His failure to observe the correct academic etiquette is translated (by Sartre) into corpulence and utter lack of physical grace. The pathos of the Satrean autodidact resides in the nature of his “appeal”, the gaze for whcih he stages his bahaviour, the symbolic Big Other to which he submits his uncomplaining travail. For this invisible witness (called Canonical Knowledge) scorns his labours as, precisely, laboured and inept. No matter what quantity of knowledge he accumulates, his mode of acquisition is wide of the mark. His very activity therefore has the nature of a category error. To Knowledge he pays a grotesque homage, which Knowledge can meet only with embarrassment.
Update. Spurious adds the following reflection, which i tend to rather agre with:
Some of us are autodidacts ... stumblers, idlers ... But perhaps it is the strange chance which allowed many of us to fall outside a consensual determination of philosophy that will transform philosophy itself. No longer, then, reasoned discussions about brains in vats and cricket matches ...