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Comment by xiaoma | Hacker News Reader

What is it about formalized schooling specifically, that you believe makes it uniquely capable in teaching people what they don't know?

When I was 18 I spent dozens of hours pouring through a university course catalogue, looking at the required courses for each degree, the prerequisite trees and the requirements for graduate degrees. It felt like a bird's-eye of the entire fractal structure of human inquiry.

Later, I realized how much sharper the view is to people who do that today. Regardless of whether or not they're a student, they can see the course catalogues online and, in the case of MIT (and many top institutions), even see lectures of those courses recorded in previous years. If you're reading this now and you don't have a very high idea what kinds of knowledge are out there, it's probably your own choice.

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I think one factor is that Universities are usually involved in research, so they're in a good position to continually identify what's important out of the existing body of knowledge, and keep their courses up to date with new ideas.

Another factor is that you can't skip over topics that don't immediately interest you. Some self-taught people can have that discipline as well, but it's not universal.

> What is it about formalized schooling specifically, that you believe makes it uniquely capable in teaching people what they don't know?

The teacher. Teaching/learning was always about the teacher, who knows what and in what order to teach.

You can have the same effects with the same effort as with formalized schooling if you have a private teacher, but how many self-taught developers had them? And then there's this small thing that in formalized schooling you're taught by several people, each for their own discipline. It's hard to come by a tutor that knows seven different fields and it's hard to come by seven tutors for each of the fields.

>who knows what and in what order to teach.

Plenty of courses have their general outline publicly available. Some colleges even share older lectures [0]. There are more-than-enough resources available for self-directed learning. Have questions? StackOverflow exists.

The #1 criticism against self-directed learning is how self-motivated the autodidact is. Most people suck at staying motivated to teach themselves. If they aren't 100% passionate about learning the subject and can keep their interest going, they will fail.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/user/MIT/playlists

> Plenty of courses have their general outline publicly available.

Yeah, something like educational videos we have since the VHS era, and even before that, handbooks. It's still nothing like having a real teacher.

I totally agree with you -- staying motivated, especially if you are learning alone from home, it's incredibly difficult. I have a thesis that I have recently started to validate which is that you can considerably improve motivation in self-directed learning environments by introducing online collaborative learning. I just wrote about it and launched a little course/workshop to test the idea: https://medium.com/@arielcamus/learn-to-build-a-backend-with...

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