The Biggest Bug in Self-Learning Is Having No Classmates

I realized I had a serious misunderstanding in my “classes are useless” view.

Author: Koutian Wu; GitHub: ktwu01

A few days ago I wrote that after high school, class is useless almost everywhere. I still hold that. Why? Class content doesn’t lead directly to a project or an outcome; you finish the course, take the exam, and then nothing. The content is usually fixed and can’t be tailored to what you need. And it usually comes with credit-hour requirements, so you sit through the hours whether or not you already know the material.

But I missed something.

My own path dependence is that I don’t go to class. What do I do instead? I teach myself. And when you teach yourself, you have no classmates. Nobody interacts with you while you learn, so you can easily slide into a mistaken mode where you only talk to yourself, and you lose the output side of what you know.

That is the first value of classmates. They are the people you output to.

Learning is not only input. Books, videos and docs only make you feel you understand. What makes you actually understand is explaining it to someone else. Teaching is learning, and that is not just a saying. When you explain a concept to another person, you find out where your thinking is fuzzy and where your logic leaks. Talking only to yourself, you never see those leaks. You just convince yourself.

The second value is emotional.

We are humans. We are emotional, we don’t interact like machines, we have cultures. I’ll leave it at that, but it is real.

What I find more interesting is that a classroom is a repeated game. Students run into each other every day; if you burn me today, we still have a group project tomorrow. In a repeated game, people drift toward cooperation and trust. Outside the classroom, in society at large, many encounters are one-shot games. You meet once and that’s it, and that is where aggressive behavior shows up. The classroom manufactures a trust environment through repetition.

So my conclusion: skipping class is fine, but you have to find a replacement for the social part.

One option is running a social media account. After I started mine, I found a lot of people interacting with me in the comments and messages, asking questions, pushing back. People anywhere in the world can become your classmates, with no class roster limiting who.

Another is hackathons, or any project where you form a team. You stay up late and debug together, and if you keep showing up in the same circle, you meet the same people again and again. Now you have your repeated game.

Personally, I would rather read the README docs and do hackathons to make friends than sit in a classroom.

A class is a bundled package: knowledge, social life, and a repeated game, all in one. You can skip the bundle and order à la carte.

But you need to know what was in the bundle, and whatever you leave out, you have to replace yourself.