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This is somewhat concerning to me, a software engineer in the games industry. It's true that the schooling system has failed in many parts of the world to the
by caseyy 2y ago
This is somewhat concerning to me, a software engineer in the games industry.
It's true that the schooling system has failed in many parts of the world to the point that it might harm kids in many ways, even stunting them academically. And it's great that the author's kid likes to program games and is great at Photoshop and 3D. But the usual curriculum at schools provides a breadth of general knowledge that I don't think parents or online tutorials would ever substitute for.
While this kid may be the next John Carmack, are they now robbed of the opportunity to gain enough knowledge in other disciplines to ever succeed in being a doctor, a lawyer, a mathematician or a historian? I believe so. Kids are really good at learning from anything they have access to, but online content is heavily skewed to entertainment (such as video games), and almost totally non-existent in other areas.
Before I ended up in games, I tried a few different disciplines. I went to med-school and learned things I would have never learned on YouTube because they would have simply been demonetized. Simple biology is often a controversial topic on ad-supported platforms, let alone any kind of injury or most illnesses. Health topics are very muddied by grifters to the point that patients self-diagnosing by YouTube are often very confused. So this kid would have a serious disadvantage if they ever wanted to be a doctor if this is where they learned about it. And this is assuming they would be capable of reconciling the misleading knowledge with real knowledge to be good enough at the discipline, anyways.
So all in all, I can see the benefits, but it is also very concerning to me that a kid is seriously using online content for unsupervised learning. We have all recently got a taste of how unsupervised learning on online content goes. And it's not just detrimental in learning, the world view itself online is very skewed. I am not necessarily very good at education though, so take this with a pinch of salt. It is not impossible that someone's parents, with the help of the internet, could indeed provide better education than traditional schools. I think there are such parents, although probably few and far in between.
- glitchc 2y agoI agree wholeheartedly. Technology is only good at teaching material related to technology. Sometimes the link is tenuous at best, but as long as one exists, it works. In any other subject matter areas, the kid will pick up a bunch of half-truths and whole lies.
- ndriscoll 2y agoYoutube certainly has a decent amount of good content in most fields I've tried if you want it. Khan Academy seems like a good resource at the lower level. For university material, just add "lecture 1" to your search term and look for a playlist with ~40 items, and you'll probably find a university lecture series (I just tried it with "anatomy" and "contract law" it seems to have found some). For math and physics (and maybe other fields) there's even a decent number of graduate level courses on youtube. Unsupervised youtube sounds pretty awful for most kids, but with some guidance, if you have a curious, gifted kid, it could be a dream for them.
- caseyy 2y agoIt could be a dream for them, but I think it would be an exception. Anatomy… I don’t know if you can properly learn anatomy online. Med schools have anatomy institutes with prosecutoriums ran by specialized faculty. Students learn with real cadavers. Then they learn pathological anatomy with real patients. You also learn a lot in a tactile way, for example, how big the organs are exactly and in what shape. It’s very difficult to learn anatomy to a functional degree with just slides. I think a curious kid would pick up something from an online tutorial, but they would also pick up some misconceptions. And they’d lose out on the anatomy models and practical kits schools have. I would still see YouTube learning for this kind of discipline as a serious disadvantage. For example, I could not find one lecture (in about 10 I saw just now searching for “anatomy lecture 1”) that recommends Gray’s Anatomy or similar anatomical atlas books. But they are absolutely foundational, it is the bread and butter of anatomy. 1 hour with a lecturer that would show you around such books and give a 45 minute tactile tour of a model of the human body may do much more than 100 hours of YouTube tutorials. The efficiency of learning just does not compare.
- caseyy 2y agoI actually went a bit off-topic here. Sorry. The kid doesn't need to properly learn anatomy, just to have quality access to the materials.