http://lesswrong.com/lw/3gu/the_best_textbooks_on_every_subject/
Theses folks propose the best way to teach yourself is by reading textbooks. Here is their effort to compile a list of the best textboks.
1. Why We Must Disestablish School
Many students, especially those who are poor, intuitively know what the schools do for them. They school them to confuse process and substance. Once these become blurred, a new logic is assumed: the more treatment there is, the better are the results; or, escalation leads to success. The pupil is thereby “schooled” to confuse teaching with learning, grade advancement with education, a diploma with competence, and fluency with the ability to say something new. His imagination is “schooled” to accept service in place of value. Medical treatment is mistaken for health care, social work for the improvement of community life, police protection for safety, military poise for national security, the rat race for productive work. Health, learning, dignity, independence, and creative endeavor are defined as little more than the performance of the institutions which claim to serve these ends, and their improvement is made to depend on allocating more resources to the management of hospitals, schools, and other agencies in question.
Entire book online here: DESCHOOLING SOCIETY.
via http://paulgraham.com/ambitious.html
3. Replace Universities
People are all over this idea lately, and I think they’re onto something. I’m reluctant to suggest that an institution that’s been around for a millennium is finished just because of some mistakes they made in the last few decades, but certainly in the last few decades US universities seem to have been headed down the wrong path. One could do a lot better for a lot less money.
I don’t think universities will disappear. They won’t be replaced wholesale. They’ll just lose the de facto monopoly on certain types of learning that they once had. There will be many different ways to learn different things, and some may look quite different from universities. Y Combinator itself is arguably one of them.
Learning is such a big problem that changing the way people do it will have a wave of secondary effects. For example, the name of the university one went to is treated by a lot of people (correctly or not) as a credential in its own right. If learning breaks up into many little pieces, credentialling may separate from it. There may even need to be replacements for campus social life (and oddly enough, YC even has aspects of that).
You could replace high schools too, but there you face bureaucratic obstacles that would slow down a startup. Universities seem the place to start.
Learning how to write software for computers, aka learning how to code, is a really good idea. It’s one of those things many people have taught themeselves and created very good careers out of. It’s true a Computer Science degree is a good thing. But spending a lot of money at University is not at all required. Here is an example of one persons decision to quit law school, teach himself some skills, and get a job at a well known company.
Learning to Code: The Roadmap I Wish I Had Been Given – Jimmy Li.
Raspberry PI: A ($35) Programmable Computer in Every Kindergarten | HASTAC.
As I’ve argued at length before, learning to code as a little child changes the way we think about STEM. No longer is it a rote skill that has to be tested by a multiple choice test at the end. With programming, kids learn that you try and try and try again until you get the right algorithm, the right code, and your reward is that your computer screen does what you wanted it to do. What happens next? You build on that code so your computer does something else you want and on and on. Sure beats a bubble test to tell you if you are learning math!
What is Raspberry Pi?
The Raspberry Pi is a single-board computer developed in the UK by the Raspberry Pi Foundation. The foundation plans to release two versions, priced at US$25 and $35 (~GB£16 and ~£22). The Foundation started accepting orders for the $35 model on 29 February 2012.[4] The Raspberry Pi is intended to stimulate the teaching of basic computer science in schools.
Source: Wikipedia
STEM – science, technology, engineering, and mathematics
From The Chronicle of Higher Education
In the green dorm at the University of Vermont, students can teach other students in “guilds” devoted to sewing, canning, composting, beekeeping, and other skills. L. Pearson King, a junior environmental-studies major, taught his peers how to carve spoons in a woodworking guild last year. “It’s kind of trivial, but it’s also cathartic and kind of fun,” he says of the project, and the students in his group were immensely proud of their work. “To be active in the creation of an item forms a completely different relationship with that item.”
… and it’ll radically alter how we view education. Specifically work force development training. If you can print anything yourself why do we need factories full of workers?
