[tiglionabbit]

The additive/subtractive colors thing is has a really neat sort of symmetry to it. That's how I knew it was the correct explanation. There was no such beautiful internal logic to the Red Blue Yellow system and I couldn't figure out how people came up with it.

I never believed my teachers. As early as 4th grade they were treating me like a troublemaker for not following rules like their three-paragraph essay format.

I don't like the idea of having authorities on knowledge. I much prefer Montessori or Socratic teaching methods, or explorations. They're harder to do, but they produce a better understanding of the material and they allow the student to teach the teacher as well.

[braindeath]

Yeah, unfortunately color perception is one of those things that is a bit too complex for a self-discovery method. While the "symmetry" explanation is satisfying it really isn't correct at all. Color perception and color matching within art (where it was useful) and more recently as a science is something that is complicated and took many years of the best scientific minds to figure out. Sometimes you need authorities on knowledge, and stand on the shoulders of giants as it were.

https://web.archive.org/web/20080717034228/http://www.handpr...

The teachers aren't completely "wrong", they were just conveying a simplification of history of pigments (also touched on in that article). It is after all true you can mix those colors and get a wide-range of colors (including a blacker black then you would with CMY). But any pedagogy that says there is such a thing as "primary" colors that make all colors is necessarily going to be wrong, even if its CMY.