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> Ultimately, what people need to realize is that autodidacticism is the most efficient form of learning.

I call bull.

I can learn from a math teacher in an hour what would take me possibly years, or a lifetime for that matter, to discover on my own.

During 2 years of college lecture classes one can learn what took philosophers and eventually mathematicians nearly 2000 years to discover.

But what about the arts?

Again, same story. Thousands of years of progress and theory can be summed up and taught in just months. (A wee bit of practice may then be required to master certain skills! ;) )

Yes some self directed learning is valuable, and indeed almost every class I took had aspect of self guided learning in it. Teachers loved leading us halfway to the goal, pointing us in a general direction, and then letting us go forth and discover the answer for ourselves.

Now do I think how public schools are currently ran is ideal? Heck no, far from it. No Child Left Behind was a huge damaging blow to the American educational system.

But what I always wanted out of school was more direction, not less. I passionately hated assignments where students had to go off and make their own video presentations and other such activities.

Yet in theory, giving presentations is of some value, it requires the students to acquire information on their own, summarize it into a communicable form, and then share that information with others. (I just despised how much class time was devoted to watching very bad presentations...)

But hey, that sounds like self guided learning, at a public school no less!

One thing to remember is that trying to dictate any one educational style is going to fail some non-trivial percent of students.

As I said in another comment, I did horrible in unstructured classes. More structure would have been my desire. IMHO school would have benefited from having 2 hours set aside just for an open study room for students to do HW in. But that is mostly because as a kid, left to my own devices, I would go home and play games rather than study. Heck I'd read a month's worth of reading assignments on the bus home, then never do the book reports!

Likewise for finding study groups. As someone with social anxiety (which was much worse as a kid!) asking the class to form groups would result in me hiding in a corner somewhere. Suffice to say I never was good at getting language practice in either!

But lab classes, oh wow I rocked at those. Love'd them. On a related note, questions come up as to the suitability of unstructured learning for certain topics. E.g. How would unstructured learning have students do genetic modifications of bacteria? Or play with explosives? Both are some of my fondest memories from high school! Both involved very explicit step by step instructions written down that we followed to the letter! (For good reason!)

I guess my overall point is that ideologues of any type tend to have a drum and enjoy beating it, much to the determent of someone somewhere else.

> I can learn from a math teacher in an hour what would take me possibly years, or a lifetime for that matter, to discover on my own.

I would be surprised if this is true, unless you can't read. Usually the reverse is true. (Which is not to discount the value of guidance, but real learning happens with you, not anyone else; in an hour (or less), you can find out about a good book or problem to study from a math teacher, which could take years of searching on your own, but the learning doesn't happen by you listening to them talk, especially in math.)

> I would be surprised if this is true, unless you can't read. Usually the reverse is true.

I, and many other students, pre-read our mathematics text before class started.

It was of about 0 usefulness. I'd say maybe 10%-15% comprehension.

Steps to solve a problem were always cut out, and always seemingly the ones that we needed most to see. Example problems were either too complex or too simple. And explanations of complex topics were poorly written all around.

A good professor comes in, sees where we are having problems at. Discusses the topics in ways we can relate to, helps guide us down the path of understanding. Demonstrates techniques on the board at various levels of difficulty, ensuring we can see not only how is an idea applied to a trivial problem, but also how it is applied within a larger framework as well.

I am someone who loves to read, and who learns really well from reading. But when it comes to math I don't think I ever got any comprehension from a mathematics textbook by itself. Typically after a lecture was given, maybe 80% of the book would make sense. Sometimes, on a few chapters, 100%. Eventual understanding of what the book said came only after mastery of the technique, from which I could work backwards to figure out what the book was doing.

Then there is the fact that applying a concept is a huge part of understanding it. Application and practice are what take a shakily understood idea that will be soon forgotten and turn it into an understanding of a new way of thinking that will stick with the student for life.

A good professor can see what areas of understanding their class is struggling with and assign problems appropriately, helping to ensure that students come away from their schooling with life long knowledge.

And of course on top of this there remains the fact that different people have different abilities of reading. One of the smartest people I know is dyslexic, it is faster for him to have someone else read the text to him than for him to read it himself!

Naturally I know people who were able to just read their math textbook and understand everything in it. Kudos to them! For the rest of the students though, who were all actively asking questions and engaging with the professors during classes, it seems that they most certainly gained value out of class lectures!

Indeed, office hours were also popular. The typical rule in study groups I attended was we'd spend 2-3 hours trying to understand a concept together before we marked it down as "ask the professor about it".

That's interesting. For me, in the only somewhat hard math class I took in college, the class meetings were mostly useless. All that I learned came from solving the problems.

But it could just be a learning style difference.

For me, solving the problems cemented the concepts. Some problems I couldn't solve, I'd ask another student for help, they'd explain the remainder of the concept that I was failing to grasp, and things would make sense. If they didn't go to prof next day for help.

Basically the professor would show off the technique in various usages, I'd take copious step by step notes, and then try to apply those same techniques to problems given. A really good problem set builds up difficulty and slowly expands upon the initial base techniques.

This is in strict contrast to how CS is taught. Although CS is still largely "throw in pool, hope students figure it out". IMHO I think I learned more in CS from discussions after class with the prof than from most classes, and I also think many other students would agree with me. :)

The value of a teacher lies not in the simple provision of knowledge, but in aiding the student to avoid or escape local maxima of comprehension.

I'm a huge fan of what some schools are doing to support that strength: khan academy for homework, problem solving in class.

This brings schools closer to a "do to learn" system instead of the "learn then do" they are in now.

Wow, you said in one sentence what I've failed to say in 10s of paragraphs throughout this thread!

Kudos for your masterful explanation.

It's honestly something that i found out entirely through self-experience. I'm a self-taught Perl developer who spent 5 years to reach a proficient level. I managed to get another developer with little Perl experience to nearly my level within 6 months by handing him two excellent books and reading his code and pointing out issues in his algorithms and semantics.

The local maxima i am aware of here are:

1. Outdated books. When i learned Perl i wasted a lot of time on books that are now known widely to be objectively bad, but are still recommended widely. The ones i recommended allowed learning with little friction.

2. Algorithmic and semantic problems that have to be resolved through lengthy investigation sessions long after they're implemented. I spent a LOT of time figuring out what doesn't work well in the long run. He's been able to skip those and spend his time more productively on problems that i haven't encoutered or solved yet.

I'm not trying to toot my horn here and i think i'm not a good teacher. But the advantages he had from me being available were staggering.

(The wordy rant to offset my quotable. ;) )

> I spent a LOT of time figuring out what doesn't work well in the long run. He's been able to skip those and spend his time more productively on problems that i haven't encoutered or solved yet.

This is one thing teachers are really good for!

I'm sure some students would figure out not to sure GOTO after awhile, but, well, think of all those wasted years! Easier to just explain to them the problems upfront!

> I managed to get another developer with little Perl experience to nearly my level within 6 months by handing him two excellent books and reading his code and pointing out issues in his algorithms and semantics.

Part of this is natural ability as well. I have a friend who much to my dismay is not a software engineer, but who only dabbles.

I was able to explain lambdas and closures to him in a couple of minutes over IM, and he was almost immediately able to see their uses.

Meanwhile, I know experienced software engineers who cannot fathom the purpose of a Lambda, and a few friends I know who are just not intelligent enough (?) to comprehend on a deep level how lambdas and closures work.

Now all this said, the college professor who was supposed to teach us functional programming did such as piss poor job at it that I ended up not understanding basic FP concepts until I started using them in C# and reading about how they are implemented in the CLR. (Part of this is because Eric Lippert is a damn good writer...)

I think the text book we had at the time defined them solely in terms of mathematical constructs. Ugh.

During 2 years of college lecture classes one can learn what took philosophers and eventually mathematicians nearly 2000 years to discover.

This is an oddly phrased rebuttal. I don't think anybody is saying that you should try to re-play 2000 years of math, science, and philosophy discoveries ex nihilo. Rather, the suggestion is that you don't need an instructor to discover (or summarize) Euler, Newton, and Plato. You can do it on your own.

Excellent point, and to build on it:

Just because the elapsed time was 2000 years does not imply 2 years of study at a fixed hourly class time is a meaningful metric for what we're talking about.

The history of discovery and how ideas were constrained in the ancient world and the time it took to discover ideas is not related to the fixed-time dedicated study of the topic. The connection is totally meaningless.

Some measure of units of information would be meaningful. Discussing discovery and the established discipline as isolated things (or describing how they could be connected in that context) is meaningful.

That's your preference, and I respect it. But writing a long rant attempting to prove that your personal preference is true for everyone is silly. I personally have taught myself the vast majority of what I know. So you are wrong.

EDIT: maybe I'm misjudging your tone. If so, my bad.

My overall message is that the original poster's line

> Ultimately, what people need to realize is that autodidacticism is the most efficient form of learning.

Is making a huge statement about everyone and every possible topic to learn!

He is making an absolute statement about human psychology of all things. Thankfully absolutes statements are easy to disprove, only a single counter example is needed!

> I personally have taught myself the vast majority of what I know.

Well I'd say that I also taught myself the vast majority of what I know! :) But to be fair that is because I spend multiple hours per day reading! That said, I'd also argue that self directed reading is not the most efficient way of learning. On more than one occasion I have spent days reading up on topics and then only been enlightened after having a 10 minute conversation with a friend!

Likewise, all the mathematics and the vast majority of the science I know comes from instructors at school. I am good at math[1] (heck I love math!), and I was likely in the top 20% of students to pick up on stuff in class, but by no means could I have taught myself! Thankfully I went to a community college where classes were small and resembled a back and forth discussion between students and the professor, so it wasn't a strict "lessons from up top" type of learning either.

Which kind of is my overall point, some topics require a different learning style! Rote memorization is actually really good for learning some types of material.

Likewise, for all those math classes, group discussions after class where we all brought our understandings together to form one cohesive whole, was when everything really clicked. The lecture for an hour got us started and gave us the foundation, two hours of study group dedicated to solving actual problems with what we had just learned is what brought full comprehension.

There is no one catch all solution for the entire population. If we were going to be truly civilized about it, we'd design tests to discover how people best learn, and put them into classes accordingly. Heck make it tests per topic even, how I learned writing is different than how I learned math!

[1] Well used to be good at it, back when I still used it in school. :)

I'd be interested to know roughly what sort of employment/positions you've taken up over the years for the purpose of an extension of the timeline you've started here, if you're willing to share.

I only got through college with the help of my GF at the time. No way I would have even gone to class without her! Graduated major in CS, minor in Mathematics.

Right now I am a Software Engineer in a crazy start-up like team that has insane deadlines and crazy big dreams. Every day is nuts, I am running around trying to keep some semblance of order, and I love it. :) I'm always being pushed outside my comfort zone (C# developer thrust into deep embedded development!) and being challenged on all sides.

The thing is though, even now, I am not good at doing my own projects on the side. If it is part of work, I'll have fun finding an awesome way to solve problems, I am good at being pragmatics about applying the latest software engineering trends balanced with actually getting things done, so I am typically pretty close to the forefront of Cool Stuff(tm). But I regret not having the self control needed to do coding on my own time. The dopamine hit from Video Games (and from novel content) is just too great.

It pains me that you do sound smug, arrogant and also patronizing because you're bang on in your analysis.

Please, I'm basically begging you: don't adopt an obnoxious stance when you're arguing an important point.

Not because you're wrong, but because you're mostly right.

This comment should be in permanent red bold type on the hacker news compose reply screen.

I'm a recovering internet asshat, and want to post two great techniques to improve the tone:

1. Talk about the topic exclusively. It's best to avoid talking about yourself and especially how you were right. Also, avoid speaking to your audience as if on stage. (Ie, "This is my point. Never forget that", can be "This is the point."). This may be against intuition, but it works to remove ego on all sides and focus on the conversation.

2. Always try to say "yes, and" before you say no. Agreeing with the point and building on it is generative. Blocking hurts.

Not to be smug, arrogant or patronizing, but I would be completely okay with that. ;)

I like to phrase this to my friends as "don't Dawkins your points."

> autodidacticism is the most efficient form of learning

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bloom's_2_Sigma_Problem

I feel a TV show pitch coming on (I'm sure it's been done).

A small group of people are chosen with a similar job/background - all professors of Physics say, or all refuse collectors, or all high-school drop-outs, ...

Those people are then given a challenge to do something that is known to be outside of their locus of experience - make a souffle, do a science demonstration, play a musical instrument. One is given a professional educator with the relevant experience of the field and a budget of money for resources, the other is given nothing except the same money for resources (which can not in this case be people).

A prize is offered for the best results (in order to try to account for poor will-power; perhaps the prize is split between trainer and trainee if they win). The results are recorded for the entertainment of the masses.

So, Endemol, call me ...?

That is a pretty striking finding. Has it been reproduced and is it accepted outside the work of that one researcher (and his students)?

"what people need to realize is that autodidacticism is the most efficient form of learning."

Grand claims require grand evidence. Until then what we have is the widespread observation that compulsory schooling appears to have outcompeted it's competitors everywhere.

I appreciate everything you've said. Obviously not everyone will have their mind blown by these observations if they're already well informed on much of this.

My point was more toward the general public and the idea that such a radically different educational environment is preparing students for success in college and wide range of jobs should be at least inspire some curiosity...

I understand, and I apologize for my arrogant tone.

However, I felt as though the general tone expressed in this blog post was quite condescending. It's as if you've discovered some deeply hidden and arcane mystery of life that you're now willing to share with the unwashed, and you express shock at how their minds could not be blown by such a proposition.

Then, you are posting this on HN, so it was only a matter of time, anyway. I hope I saved a fellow ostentatious bloke the work.

In the end, thanks for spreading awareness of this.

Yea, I know. It's tough to strike the right tone in the blog post and in the end the format was structured to be readable and get attention as I really do just want people to think about these ideas more, even if in the end they don't agree with them.

> Fact of the matter is compulsory schooling originated to instill obedience in the context of the Prussian militarist regime, later becoming adopted by industrial moguls in the USA during the late 19th century, due to the necessity of cheap and easily disposable labor.

If by industrial moguls you mean thousands of locally-elected school boards in rural, agrarian small towns. During the period that public schools caught on in the U.S., the society was still a thoroughly decentralized Jeffersonian republic. Democratic centralism had not yet won any level of government, let alone the present nationalized education swamp.

Autodidacticism only works for people who are highly intelligent, who have attention easily captured by books, and who have strong verbal skills. The other 99.5% of people need teachers. The Sudbury school produces graduates who have gaping holes in their knowledge, on whatever topics did not aggressively capture their attention.