By the way, there is one benefit of a systematically fed knowledge—it prevents you from getting into selection spiral, where you want to learn about something, find the first piece of knowledge belonging to some small subset of what you want to learn, become impressed and learn the whole subset… mistakenly believing that you actually learned the whole set.
For example, one can learn programming in Java and believe that “programming in Java” equals “programming”, and there is nothing useful to be learned outside. Or one can learn behaviorism and believe that behaviorism is the only and the complete answer to psychology. Or learn one economical theory, or learn one political view, or...
In such situations, the best part of the systematically fed knowledge is that it usually starts with a roadmap: it shows you a list of subsets. That’s the best part… and probably from that point on you could again be better by learning those subsets on your own. (Supposing you are able to update about the existence and importance of the other subsets; many people aren’t.)
For the things I believed to be important, I leaned more on my own than in school. But the school taught me a few things I didn’t consider important… until I learned them. (And also many things I still consider unimportant.)
Personally I have always chosen the self learning path, only going to college to obtain the ‘proof’ for work requirements but have been very impressed with the recent MOOC offerings (e.g. Machine Learning, Model Thinking).
The format is very flexible and works well for people who like the self learning path.
By the way, there is one benefit of a systematically fed knowledge—it prevents you from getting into selection
spiral, where you want to learn about something
This is a valid point, but each individual has different levels of understanding prior to starting, yet the content usually covers all grounding material meaning that many people end up with boring subjects.
I don’t think most schools explicitly give roadmaps. A list of courses and especially a list of required courses is a roadmap. Courses often start with a syllabus. But I don’t think most students notice either roadmap. And why should they? If being systematically fed knowledge, the student has no need to know the system.
Added: Yes, the advice to autodidacts to seek roadmaps is good, but you imply that a student who starts at school and drops out is well-equipped for self-study, which I think is false.
By the way, there is one benefit of a systematically fed knowledge—it prevents you from getting into selection spiral, where you want to learn about something, find the first piece of knowledge belonging to some small subset of what you want to learn, become impressed and learn the whole subset… mistakenly believing that you actually learned the whole set.
For example, one can learn programming in Java and believe that “programming in Java” equals “programming”, and there is nothing useful to be learned outside. Or one can learn behaviorism and believe that behaviorism is the only and the complete answer to psychology. Or learn one economical theory, or learn one political view, or...
In such situations, the best part of the systematically fed knowledge is that it usually starts with a roadmap: it shows you a list of subsets. That’s the best part… and probably from that point on you could again be better by learning those subsets on your own. (Supposing you are able to update about the existence and importance of the other subsets; many people aren’t.)
For the things I believed to be important, I leaned more on my own than in school. But the school taught me a few things I didn’t consider important… until I learned them. (And also many things I still consider unimportant.)
Personally I have always chosen the self learning path, only going to college to obtain the ‘proof’ for work requirements but have been very impressed with the recent MOOC offerings (e.g. Machine Learning, Model Thinking). The format is very flexible and works well for people who like the self learning path.
This is a valid point, but each individual has different levels of understanding prior to starting, yet the content usually covers all grounding material meaning that many people end up with boring subjects.
I don’t think most schools explicitly give roadmaps. A list of courses and especially a list of required courses is a roadmap. Courses often start with a syllabus. But I don’t think most students notice either roadmap. And why should they? If being systematically fed knowledge, the student has no need to know the system.
Added: Yes, the advice to autodidacts to seek roadmaps is good, but you imply that a student who starts at school and drops out is well-equipped for self-study, which I think is false.