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Comment by adamnemecek | Hacker News Reader

Idk my experience is that in college, a lot of the TF are legitimately clueless. I think that college needs to be more of a support environment for self education rather than this sort of place where you literally repeat what you are told.

Society would be better off if people were guided to autodidacticism.

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>Society would be better off if people were guided to autodidacticism....

I don't know man?

Might be fine if you're majoring in something harmless like music, or art. But for the safety of society at large you just can't implement such a naive system for majors like nuclear engineering or virology. It'd just be irresponsible to the point of being outright dangerous.

Do people learn anything from lectures about safety at school? Everyone takes computer ethics. Everyone knows about Therac-25. Where are we 30 years later? Engineers still implement open-loop control systems. Programmers still write programs with integer overflows. Speed to market beats safety every time (hello, MCAS). So was it really worth thousands of dollars for someone to tell you about that in a class? A few people dying is always a lower priority than a higher share price, it seems. So might as well not waste money on education, right?

There's definitely a middle ground to be achieved here. Rigorous assessment doesn't have to go away to implement this.

> naive

It's not naive. No, in my system people could actually pick up nuclear engineering in high school as opposed to college. It's retarded that school in some delays you, because in hs, you need to do some bullshit as opposed to what you want.

I also didn't say anything against assessments.

That's always been the theory underpinning a liberal education, that it teaches its students to think and reason for themselves. Of course, the distance between theory and practice is something else.

I haven't seen it implemented well.

agreed. Half of the stuff I was taught was years out of date, and while interesting from a historical perspective, was not useful to me other than during the exam. Waste of time and money really.

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