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Comment by nudetayne | Hacker News Reader

Khan Academy isn't good and never will be. It fills the gap for new college students who didn't pay attention in class and never learned how to read a textbook. True classroom education comes from sharing experience, not regurgitating material and doing practice problems.

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Have you actually read about Khans theorys on how the class room and school should work? He wrote a book about it hand he gave mutlible talks.

Of course it is you who knows where "true classroom education" comes from. I can think of many actual examples of classroom education that happened without sharing experience, although maybe not "true classroom education".

What else is classroom education if you're not sharing experience? You can study on your own, so putting stuff on the board from a book doesn't count. You can do practice problems on your own, so going through examples from a book doesn't count. What else is left? The only thing to be gained from a classroom is experience that's unique to classmates and the instructor.

> What else is left?

Many people (including me) learn much better from listening to a person talk than from reading textbooks, even with no avenue to communicate back to that person.

You likely don't know how to read textbooks correctly. It's a legitimate problem in school systems around the world - most kids are taught from an early age to do exactly what the teacher says and that's how you learn. Thus, they never learn anything on their own.

The idea that different people learn in different ways isn't one I just came up with. See the brief survey on Wikipedia here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Learning_styles

I find the idea that my preference for listening over reading textbooks implies I don't know how to read them is somewhat bemusing.

I doubt you could come up with anything since you can only learn from other people, apparently. "Learning styles" is just another way of pronouncing "lazy".

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