Comment by HPsquared
8 months ago
Still better than the typical classroom experience. And you can always ask again, there's no need to avoid offending the person who has a lot of power over you.
8 months ago
Still better than the typical classroom experience. And you can always ask again, there's no need to avoid offending the person who has a lot of power over you.
Typical classroom experience works and has worked for thousands of years.
Edutech is pretty new and virtually all of it has been a disaster. Sitting in a lecture and taking notes on paper is tried, tested, and research backed. It works. Not for everyone, but for a lot of people.
Actually, before https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Amos_Comenius in 17th century much of education was route memorization.
Then it was corporal punishment if you did not learn quickly enough.
Comenius idea was of pansophia - knowledge for all. Also his Latin textbook - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Janua_Linguarum_Reserata was quite revolutionary - in using relations to real world knowledge to learn a new language.
Even more ground breaking was his picture book for children - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orbis_Pictus . We take hybrid approach to learning for granted these days.
Even then Comenius was mostly forgotten in the enlightenment of 18th century - probably ideas of Jean-Jacques Rousseau took over - with insufficient backing.
Education is bound to culture and life in general. We just can't imagine nowadays how fatalistic and submissive to god and authority people's world view was before protestants in medieval Europe. An education bound to memorization and pretty violent culture helped to mould the people society needed at the time. But it wasn't always like that. There were quite different views to learning in ancient Greek, during golden age of islam etc.
Talk is cheap; if you want to see what people really believe, ignore what they claim and look at what they actually do. And when you do that, you see that people generally don't find typical college classes to be worth it outside of the credentials they give. Almost no one with a CS degree goes back to college to take a college algorithm course when they want to get better at algorithms; they study on their own. You can look at plenty of the HN discussions about "how do I learn X" or "how do I get better at X"; almost none of the suggestions are "go to your local university and audit some classes."
The issues with Edutech are mostly because they're bolting it on to the same broken system that people don't find value in. But the original comment wasn't about Edutech. When people want to learn new things, they largely do it without either typical college classrooms or Edutech, because the alternatives are so much better than anything coming out of the broken academic morass.
Conversely, if we're noticing what people actually do, you'll realize close to zero people who want to pursue computer science are doing it on their own.
And not due to a lack of information. The draw of education hasn't been access, not since the internet anyway. Structure, pacing, curriculum, schedule, and measurement cannot be recreated.
I've had many people tell me they're going to learn to program online. Almost all of them fail.
At the end of the day, we go home and we don't crack open a textbook. We sit and watch TV. Maybe we go for a walk or go to the gym. The vast majority of people do not have the mindset required to be self-educated.
We used to do the "everyone self-educate" thing. Most people couldn't read or write. Humans are unintuitive. You can't just give them access to things and expect results. They require accountability, they require structure. We're not machines, we're faulty fleshy creatures. Our reward feedback loops were never built for self-determination at this high of a level.
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Sure, but regardless of what the better way to learn is, a large part of the purpose of a degree is to demonstrate to potential employers that you have a certain proficiency in a field. Universities stake their reputation and accreditation on being able to measure that proficiency. We've spent thousands of years figuring out how to do that in various ways. Maybe some day it will be easy to do that for course loads that heavily utilize LLMs, but I don't think we're quite at that point yet. Certainly they have value in assisting with learning, but it's important to defend the old methods until we get there.
> Typical classroom experience works and has worked for thousands of years
"Typical classroom experience" hasn't even meant the same thing for thousands of years.
"lecture" used to be centered around reading the source book so that students could copy it verbatim. The printing press was an important piece of "Edutech". Technology has been continuous, and much of it has been applied to impacted the experience of education, not just in the last few years, but over a long window of history. Yeah, what we currently think of as "edutech" is what has been around for only a short time, and hasn't yet been established as part of the consensus baseline -- but that's a moving target.
And it still varies a lot. There are large lectures, small lectures, labs, seminars, largely project courses, etc. Varies by subject matter of course. You probably won't have labs in an English class but you may well have a big project of some sort.