I guess it really just depends on what motivates you. Grades never motivated me, and I never felt like my academic peers and I were "like-minded", so school end

I guess it really just depends on what motivates you. Grades never motivated me, and I never felt like my academic peers and I were "like-minded", so school ended up feeling more like an impediment to my education than an enlightening experience. There are certainly problems with learning on your own, not the least of which is maintaining the drive to push through the icky parts. But in the absence of external motivational structures, you can give your self-discipline a workout. I'm not a particularly disciplined person, but I can still commit to doing 1 hour of math a day. I guess I think of it like my daily mental exercise. It's hard to develop this habit though, and if you can't, school's not a bad option. One of the other problems with learning math on your own is not having anyone to ask questions. To help with this, I've actively tried to make friends (of sorts) with math professors at a nearby school. I get lunch with one every once in a while, and we talk about sports and life and math. This can kinda substitute for the community of like-minded people that school provides. All this goes to say is that you have to be aware of how you learn and how you get motivated. If you are externally driven, and don't mind learning at a pace you did not establish, school will be useful to you. If you don't grok extrinsic motivation, school's rough and you should learn on your own.