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Comment by tzury | Hacker News Reader

One would think that in the internet era, where so much information and knowledge are avaialble online for free, those would disappear.

Apprently not.

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The bigger the deluge of information, the more valuable a guide becomes to navigate it.

There's no way to replicate the engagement that an actual teacher/tutor can provide. Some people can do just fine with self-directed study but I image most people aren't autodidacts.

Self-learning also comes with the pitfall that you may optimize for the wrong things.

When it comes to standardized tests/certain career expectations you are expected to have a broad understanding of the orthodox views on the evaluated topics.

I tutored for a short stint during my senior year of highschool (graduated in S2020, so this included the pandemic), through my Fall 2020 term at university.

This is pretty much exactly what I experienced. I was a member of an online marketplace, so I wasn't necessarily an "elite" tutor by any means, but I found that most of my students just needed instruction that was more tailored to them. A lot of them were working towards AP exams (computer science), so working with someone who had taken that exam, knew what was on it, and intimately understood how it was graded proved rather valuable, at least from what the parents reported back to me.

You can't automate the human interaction out through tech.

That's like expecting coffee vending machines to have made baristas obsolete.

As an adult I can do self study just fine and since I work in tech that's expected of me, but as a kid I was way too thick to learn the school curriculum on my own.

A guide is more important than ever. Information is properly assimilated through some mental schema. When teachers talk about teaching people "how to learn", they're talking about helping a student to form those schemata (as well as specific techniques, etc.)

I think the main value of a tutor is having someone with a mental model of what you know and don't know. This has two important consequences. One: If you are missing a prerequisite piece of knowledge the tutor can easily notice that and fix it. If you were on your own it could be a long hunt for the missing piece. And if you misunderstood something, it can take even longer to fix as you don't know that you don't know. Two: The pace can be adjusted so that you practice until you get something, and no longer. Moving at a set pace is frustrating if the pace is too quick, and boring if it is too slow.

Knowledge access is hardly the problem.

Yeah, many engineering and science fields are much more than just software, for example, so it's important to get access to and experience with various hardware equipment and even get to contribute on cutting edge work usually funded by various companies from industry.

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