And it's more fun to learn from a person than from a book. There's interaction. You can ask hard questions and they can provide profound answers that lead to other questions. Try doing that with a textbook.
And it's more fun to learn from a person than from a book. There's interaction. You can ask hard questions and they can provide profound answers that lead to other questions. Try doing that with a textbook.
Why not dispense wisdom via software from highly successful people?
Software-based learning might work for the subset of people and subjects which can be commonly learned from textbooks by self-motivated individuals now: things like programming, math, some science. But many people require the social interaction, and many topics cannot be easily managed in a purely information-dump approach.
Granted, many teachers suck. In the U.S. we don't have a system that rewards good teaching.
Also granted, the ability of the current technology to bring amazing (human!) teachers to the masses is great and growing. But, teaching is a two-way street, and you can't have much of that with 1 to 1 million ratio.
Bad teachers can make you hate a particular field for the rest of your life.