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It depends a lot on which parts of education you're talking about. The first 9-12 years are required so that kids have something to do while their parents are a
by SlySherZ 10y ago
It depends a lot on which parts of education you're talking about. The first 9-12 years are required so that kids have something to do while their parents are at work. Learning stuff and interacting with other people is a nice way to spend their time.
From that point, it depends on the subject you decide to study. It seems to me that medicine students get a lot of real life practice during their training, which makes the school almost irreplaceable.
In other areas, like programming, you're better of staying at home and watching online lectures and making your own pet projects to learn, as long as you have enough self discipline to keep yourself on track. There are tons of resources you can learn from and you can practice as much as you want. I did it and it has been working well so far.
Overall, I wouldn't say we should ditch education at all, but we should seriously rethink the way it works. We can do much better than this.
- humanrebar 10y ago> ...you're better of staying at home and watching online lectures and making your own pet projects to learn While I agree that you can get pretty far with self-study on small projects, the most important parts of software engineering revolve around communication, especially with other developers and with expert tools. It's hard to get better at communication without, well, communicating. Of course, one can get a lot of experience by contributing to open source projects or finding other ways to work on group projects.
- SlySherZ 10y agoI completly agree with the need to communicate and program with other people. From my experience, computer science degrees severely lack this communication trainning. You do ~2 small group projects per semester. The group splits the project into parts and everyone goes and does it's own part alone. There is no teamwork, source control, tests nor anything like that. I seriously hope other universities do it differently and I just attended the wrong one.
- humanrebar 10y agoI had team projects, somewhat resembling what you describe. No, I had no source control or testing training at all. I chalk that up to more academic programs being oriented towards computer science and mathematics than craftsmanship, engineering, and project management concerns.
- user5994461 10y ago>>> The first 9-12 years are required so that kids have something to do while their parents are at work. They also learn to read, write and count. It's a rather useful skillset to have :D