Becoming a yeshivish autodidact

Someone at GH wrote "I personally know rabbis who studied at RW yeshivot who are totally comfortable with the modern world and very learned in secular subjects. They did not receive that knowledge in the yeshiva, however."

To this I replied that:

[It's] true. R. Nosson Kamenetzky described himself as an "autodidact in secular knowledge." To whatever extent he is truly educated or not, you aren't going to find that many others with his background who even know what "autodidact" means.

The truth is that outside of Chassidic and extreme RW yeshivish circles it's not considered a great avlah if someone is interested and becomes well read and educated. The trouble with that is that the message that is reinforced among the young while they're in yeshiva is the exact opposite. It may be a case of protesting too much and sincerely only wishing that the youth will spend more time studying the fundamentals of Judaism now, but plenty of people take it very seriously. Some of them even eventually wake up and realize that there are some nuances that they were missing. For some of them its too late. The questions are there, the resentment is there, but they're 30 years old and don't have the ability or time to enlist in college or the knowhow and time to educate themselves.

Someone else remarked that

more than that, in the event, it's often considered a good thing. there's complete dissonance about it.

And this is 100% true!