Hacker News Reader

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.

View on HN

> 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".

Reply on news.ycombinator.com