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Comment by frankphilips | Hacker News Reader

It's about time we see some disruption in education. The old school methods of schooling will not work in this day and age. For example in the tech sector, more companies are looking for graduates that have experience rather then just a CS degree. There are free resources to learn how to code like Codeacademy, Udacity, Coursera, Mozilla’s P2PU, Google Code University, and MIT Open Courseware. There are also more and more high-quality paid resources, both online and off, like General Assembly, Treehouse or Bloc, not to mention local continuing ed classes. Mr. Khan and Peter Thiel are headed in the right direction.

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Do not confuse old with crappy. The fact that most lecture-based schools are crappy does not diminish the value of a lecture (cf. Oxford etc.). The problem is not necessary the method but the numbers.

Of course, a "lecture" on Perl is probably as useless as a "practical with computers" on Metaphysics.

This is a very important point. The problem, particularly in the US but not exclusively so, is that at the top universities the best faculty are not necessarily the best teachers. You can be a world class researcher and still be a terrible lecturer.

A truly great lecture is akin to a piece of theatre, especially in the humanities. Really, that's one of the problems with the methods that Khan promotes: they appear to work very well for quantitative subjects that can be accurately tested, but that doesn't apply to many of the arts.

I don't see why the humanities should be relegated to "ungraded seminars at night on art and literature". And, as others have pointed out here, one of the reasons Nobel laureates who are faculty may have little time for students is because they have a lot of other things to do: the same is surely true for the professionals Khan wants to advise students?

I don't want to sound as if I'm against the Khan Academy - it's fantastic. I think there is real value in implementing many of its ideas into standard education, and I know that's already happening with projects like edX and the like.

Not all lecture-based schools are crappy. However, the reality is that the more practical experience people have, the faster they learn. Having a boring "lecture" on Perl is less productive then having a quick 10 minute session on building a Hello World app using Perl. People essentially learn by doing, it's as simple as that.

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