I don't disagree but I think the quality of free education has dramatically increased with the rise of the Web. You can now consume the audio and video from the top professors around the country for free. You can work through amazing screencasts from anyone ranging from Sal Khan to some of the best Rails engineers in the world. The examples are endless.

So I definitely think the ability to self-educate has been there for a long time (you could make the case that dates all the way back to the advent of the printing press) but I think it's only in the last decade or so that we've had an explosion in the amount of high-quality, free and widely accesible educational material that is available.