[Astrohacker]

There is an enormous amount of information about science readily accessible to anyone who wants to learn it. Perhaps many people just don't care about science. If that's true, forcing them to learn it probably isn't going to accomplish anything.

[waitwhat]

It doesn't matter how much free information is out there, the majority will still do better if there's someone there to help them understand the material.

Also remember that the "competition" also has access to the same free information.

[mkr-hn]

I haven't found this accessible information. Can you point to some?

[Astrohacker]

There are tons of free textbooks available. Google for physics or math textbooks. There are also tons of free lectures available on YouTube and Khan Academy.

[mkr-hn]

I see pages of commercial textbook companies on Google, and videos wont help non-visual learners.

[jerf]

Last I knew, science is not currently very kind to the old "styles of learning" theories, which turned out to be Yet Another Educational Theory Spun From Whole Cloth by "educators" unqualified to be spinning such theories. (I give it a "Yet Another" appellation because this turns out to describe nearly every educational theory you've ever heard. The standards of rigor in the field of education study could stand to be improved quite a lot.)

[_delirium]

I can doubt some of the more specific claims, but it would be a fairly remarkable result, unlike almost any other area of human activity, if there weren't some sort of person-to-person variation in the [(amount person X gets out of a textbook) - (amount person X gets out of a video on the same subject)] function. The alternative would be the hypothesis that learning ability varies in a 100% correlated manner (people who are more skilled at picking up physics from physics textbooks are exactly as more-skilled at picking up physics from physics videos, and vice versa).

Even if you ignore the visual/textual/etc. distinctions, they have other properties as media; for example, textbooks are easier to use in a random-access/skimming manner than videos, and can be more easily taken outside or marked up. It could just be my concentration, but I also can't get through watching a YouTube video, while somehow I have no trouble reading through a book.

[mkr-hn]

I don't know about theories, but I don't learn as well from video as I do from text. And that's beside the point. The information isn't as accessible as Astrohacker claimed.

Even if you do learn reasonably well from video, you:

* Need to know what to look for

* Need to somehow know which videos are made by people who know what they're talking about

The same applies to text.