At least 300 students have been prohibited from registering for classes at Northwestern University because they refused to watch a controversial antisemitism training video that they said was biased in favor of Israel, contained factual inaccuracies and could inflame campus tension over Gaza.
What information are professors giving you that you can’t get anywhere else?
As far as history is concerned, everything they teach should come from a source other than the professor.
Your history course boils down to them walking you through a textbook. If you can read and comprehend what you’re reading, then the professor is unnecessary.
But hey, you already realized this, right?
A reading list and critical analysis.
Because an autodidact will end up reading the ‘good’ books and not reading the critiques or counter-narratives. An algorithm feed will serve you the consumable content that keeps you engaged, not the information that you need to sit with to digest and re-examine what you thought you knew to be true.
You gain the most understanding during the un-learning and analysis process. Reading one book won’t do that. Hence, a reading list.
None. The value-add that good schools and curriculums provide is curation of information, and presenting it in a time-efficient way. For a practical demonstration of the value, try learning Linux shell scripting only from man pages.
You have a very poor understanding of how to learn history and what historians do professionally. I only have a history minor but know several professional historians. What you’re describing is a historian hobbiest. Ironically this misconception is one that a lot of people clear up by going to college.
What information are professors giving you that you can’t get anywhere else?
Oh, please tell me what you learned in history that disproves this statement. I’d love to understand how you came out of those courses thinking you can just take people’s word at face value.
Edit: Look, I get it. Part of “learning history” isn’t even history related at all. It’s learning how to understand the information that you have in the context that it was given. You can’t just assume that because you read something in a history book that it’s automatically true. Hopefully, it opens your eyes to just how little information we can “know” and how difficult it is to obtain even that. (I assume your eyes are already open to this because you took the courses.)
However, none of that requires college in order to learn. It’s honestly something that our parents should be teaching us, because it’s relevant to considerably more than history.
It’s more the experience of learning from someone that is highly experienced in their field. They can guide you through multiple sources, and help understand your misconceptions and correct them. There’s also the advantage of having a question about a source and having someone who can help bring more context, and additional sources, to the discussion quickly. There’s just a lot that I personally gained from learning from another professional and I don’t think there’s a ton of on the job training, or independent study, that gets you that sort of intellectual understanding nearly as effectively.
Maybe my educational experience varies greatly from yours? There’s just an absolute ton I learned in college that wouldn’t have been nearly as efficient, quick, broad, or dense compared to doing independent study. I think that’s probably mostly true for most people in most fields as well. Having the experience of learning from someone that has already experienced many pitfalls of learning a subject is quite valuable.
I think you have some wires crossed somewhere because I didn’t say the thing you quoted me as saying here:
I’m not sure how to rebuttal this section because it seems to rest on the fact that I said the aforementioned quote.
I will say I think it’s incredibly silly to put the burden of learning a highly specific subject on your parents. There’s just no way for anyone’s parents to give you a complete understanding of any field out there that’s comparable to someone who has devoted decades to a highly specific subject. That’s just incredibly naive and honestly gave me a chuckle.
It’s not about the information itself. All of human knowledge is at your fingertips. Unfortunately, that knowledge is buried under an ocean of bullshit. And if you haven’t studied in a field, you likely cannot tell the difference between quality sources and bullshit.
You bemoan a course that consists of studying a textbook, but how do you even know what textbook to read? If you do not know the field, how do you know that it’s an accurate work of reliable history and not some right-wing slop like PragerU? And it’s not just reading the book. It’s knowing what parts to read, preparing writings, participating in discussions, and a thousand other activities that are designed to advance the learning objectives of a course. Hell, just having a course with a fixed schedule to it can be immensely beneficial to most learners. Studying is hard. It’s time consuming. And it doesn’t generate any immediate returns in your life. Most people who try to teach themselves a subject end up learning less in five years than they could in a single semester of enrolling in one or two college courses. When you’re teaching yourself something, it’s far too easy to just put off the hard dull work til tomorrow or avoid it all together.
For the love of god, without looking it up, do you even know how to pronounce the word pedagogy?
If you had taken even a single course in education or course design, you would know there is so much more to designing a course than simply reading a textbook. I’ve taught and designed numerous college courses. If you think it’s just a matter of reading from a textbook, you are standing atop a mountain of ignorance.
I’m lazy and I don’t feel like putting more effort into arguing with your other nonsense, but you can just look up what textbooks are used by each institution.
I’m going to ignore you now because you’re not worth my time or energy. I hope you have fun defending how you wasted money on something you could’ve done yourself for free; it’s how you people operate.