This article got me thinking about the constructivist theory of education... and I realized that as a self-taught programmer, this theory hasn't worked for me e

This article got me thinking about the constructivist theory of education... and I realized that as a self-taught programmer, this theory hasn't worked for me except in very limited ways. I think constructivism works within a certain radius of mastered knowledge. No amount of 'fumbling around' is going to allow me to write a parser, or an operating system. Even for something that I have (or had) the motivation to do, which is to write a very simple learning game [0], the lack of knowledge was a show-stopper. I think constructivism works for tasks that are just outside of your scope of knowledge. So if I really wanted to create a rails app, I could do that, since that's what I've been doing. [0] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1032484 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1032484