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You don't know what you don't know. This is what struck me about my formal education. While I also believe you can learn anything with enough material and dedi

by n0w 10y ago

You don't know what you don't know. This is what struck me about my formal education. While I also believe you can learn anything with enough material and dedication on your own, having the structure to ensure that you cover a set of subjects that constitute "foundational knowledge" can be invaluable.

alkonaut 10y ago
This is an excellent point. A lot of what I learned in university was things I didn't know before, and didn't learn either, but I learned they existed. When faced with a problem now, I can often identify at least what area of my non-knowledge it belongs to. In that sense I knew a lot less after university than before (in a relative sense). The ninja skill you get from a very broad education isnt solving problems by applying knowledge, its solving problems by identifying them (then Googling)
xiaoma 10y ago
What is it about formalized schooling specifically, that you believe makes it uniquely capable in teaching people what they don't know? When I was 18 I spent dozens of hours pouring through a university course catalogue, looking at the required courses for each degree, the prerequisite trees and the requirements for graduate degrees. It felt like a bird's-eye of the entire fractal structure of human inquiry. Later, I realized how much sharper the view is to people who do that today. Regardless of whether or not they're a student, they can see the course catalogues online and, in the case of MIT (and many top institutions), even see lectures of those courses recorded in previous years. If you're reading this now and you don't have a very high idea what kinds of knowledge are out there, it's probably your own choice.
- aninhumer 10y ago
  I think one factor is that Universities are usually involved in research, so they're in a good position to continually identify what's important out of the existing body of knowledge, and keep their courses up to date with new ideas. Another factor is that you can't skip over topics that don't immediately interest you. Some self-taught people can have that discipline as well, but it's not universal.
- dozzie 10y ago
  > What is it about formalized schooling specifically, that you believe makes it uniquely capable in teaching people what they don't know? The teacher. Teaching/learning was always about the teacher, who knows what and in what order to teach. You can have the same effects with the same effort as with formalized schooling if you have a private teacher, but how many self-taught developers had them? And then there's this small thing that in formalized schooling you're taught by several people, each for their own discipline. It's hard to come by a tutor that knows seven different fields and it's hard to come by seven tutors for each of the fields.
  - Nadya 10y ago
    >who knows what and in what order to teach. Plenty of courses have their general outline publicly available. Some colleges even share older lectures [0]. There are more-than-enough resources available for self-directed learning. Have questions? StackOverflow exists. The #1 criticism against self-directed learning is how self-motivated the autodidact is. Most people suck at staying motivated to teach themselves. If they aren't 100% passionate about learning the subject and can keep their interest going, they will fail. [0] https://www.youtube.com/user/MIT/playlists https://www.youtube.com/user/MIT/playlists
    - dozzie 10y ago
      > Plenty of courses have their general outline publicly available. Yeah, something like educational videos we have since the VHS era, and even before that, handbooks. It's still nothing like having a real teacher.
    - arielcamus 10y ago
      I totally agree with you -- staying motivated, especially if you are learning alone from home, it's incredibly difficult. I have a thesis that I have recently started to validate which is that you can considerably improve motivation in self-directed learning environments by introducing online collaborative learning. I just wrote about it and launched a little course/workshop to test the idea: https://medium.com/@arielcamus/learn-to-build-a-backend-with-node-js-doing-pair-programming-b6d5a241b846#.utueveijh https://medium.com/@arielcamus/learn-to-build-a-backend-with...
sroussey 10y ago
Don't forget the part where you had to do things that you didn't like (possibly hated) and only much later, truly appreciated.
zamalek 10y ago
> You don't know what you don't know. Self-taught developer with the mentioned "foundational knowledge." I'm very strong so far as any university-level CS subject goes. One area where I have recently learned that "I don't know" is anything beyond high school calculus - having started to play around with Tensorflow. You are most certainly correct and now, instead of immediately having that expertise at my fingertips, I have to self-learn it over a month.

by n0w 10y ago

alkonaut 10y ago

This is an excellent point. A lot of what I learned in university was things I didn't know before, and didn't learn either, but I learned they existed. When faced with a problem now, I can often identify at least what area of my non-knowledge it belongs to. In that sense I knew a lot less after university than before (in a relative sense). The ninja skill you get from a very broad education isnt solving problems by applying knowledge, its solving problems by identifying them (then Googling)

xiaoma 10y ago

What is it about formalized schooling specifically, that you believe makes it uniquely capable in teaching people what they don't know? When I was 18 I spent dozens of hours pouring through a university course catalogue, looking at the required courses for each degree, the prerequisite trees and the requirements for graduate degrees. It felt like a bird's-eye of the entire fractal structure of human inquiry. Later, I realized how much sharper the view is to people who do that today. Regardless of whether or not they're a student, they can see the course catalogues online and, in the case of MIT (and many top institutions), even see lectures of those courses recorded in previous years. If you're reading this now and you don't have a very high idea what kinds of knowledge are out there, it's probably your own choice.

aninhumer 10y ago
I think one factor is that Universities are usually involved in research, so they're in a good position to continually identify what's important out of the existing body of knowledge, and keep their courses up to date with new ideas. Another factor is that you can't skip over topics that don't immediately interest you. Some self-taught people can have that discipline as well, but it's not universal.
dozzie 10y ago
> What is it about formalized schooling specifically, that you believe makes it uniquely capable in teaching people what they don't know? The teacher. Teaching/learning was always about the teacher, who knows what and in what order to teach. You can have the same effects with the same effort as with formalized schooling if you have a private teacher, but how many self-taught developers had them? And then there's this small thing that in formalized schooling you're taught by several people, each for their own discipline. It's hard to come by a tutor that knows seven different fields and it's hard to come by seven tutors for each of the fields.
- Nadya 10y ago
  >who knows what and in what order to teach. Plenty of courses have their general outline publicly available. Some colleges even share older lectures [0]. There are more-than-enough resources available for self-directed learning. Have questions? StackOverflow exists. The #1 criticism against self-directed learning is how self-motivated the autodidact is. Most people suck at staying motivated to teach themselves. If they aren't 100% passionate about learning the subject and can keep their interest going, they will fail. [0] https://www.youtube.com/user/MIT/playlists https://www.youtube.com/user/MIT/playlists
  - dozzie 10y ago
    > Plenty of courses have their general outline publicly available. Yeah, something like educational videos we have since the VHS era, and even before that, handbooks. It's still nothing like having a real teacher.
  - arielcamus 10y ago
    I totally agree with you -- staying motivated, especially if you are learning alone from home, it's incredibly difficult. I have a thesis that I have recently started to validate which is that you can considerably improve motivation in self-directed learning environments by introducing online collaborative learning. I just wrote about it and launched a little course/workshop to test the idea: https://medium.com/@arielcamus/learn-to-build-a-backend-with-node-js-doing-pair-programming-b6d5a241b846#.utueveijh https://medium.com/@arielcamus/learn-to-build-a-backend-with...

sroussey 10y ago

Don't forget the part where you had to do things that you didn't like (possibly hated) and only much later, truly appreciated.

zamalek 10y ago

> You don't know what you don't know. Self-taught developer with the mentioned "foundational knowledge." I'm very strong so far as any university-level CS subject goes. One area where I have recently learned that "I don't know" is anything beyond high school calculus - having started to play around with Tensorflow. You are most certainly correct and now, instead of immediately having that expertise at my fingertips, I have to self-learn it over a month.