Okay, maybe they tried to say it's because there are so many hits, and you can't tell good from bad if you're a novice... But you know what you learn from Googling that you don't from them?
Telling good from bad!
Of course, you learn to program from both of them.
For me, Google is cheaper, faster, and I learn more.
The point is that this can take a lot of time, and most technical people don't have the time or inclination to do it for free.
And it's not that I would get lazy in the classes, either. I would get bored waiting for the teacher and start messing around with things while I waited, and then continue with the lesson when everyone caught up. (Not their fault, I had other languages under my belt already.) I tried to do just as much experimentation in class as I would at home.
And that was all before the internet was available to me. Now that I have the internet, I can research questions and issues so fast that I won't even bother asking an expert sitting beside me. It's faster and I learn more from the web.
I'm not saying this is the method for everyone, but it's so much faster and easier for me this way that I find it hard to believe I'm a minority.
Physicians have mentors. Attorneys have mentors. Doctoral students of all stripes have mentors. Why don't software engineers? The notion that software engineers are all supposed to be autodidacts is very odd, I think.