[nudetayne]

What else is classroom education if you're not sharing experience? You can study on your own, so putting stuff on the board from a book doesn't count. You can do practice problems on your own, so going through examples from a book doesn't count. What else is left? The only thing to be gained from a classroom is experience that's unique to classmates and the instructor.

[kibibu]

> What else is left?

Many people (including me) learn much better from listening to a person talk than from reading textbooks, even with no avenue to communicate back to that person.

[nudetayne]

You likely don't know how to read textbooks correctly. It's a legitimate problem in school systems around the world - most kids are taught from an early age to do exactly what the teacher says and that's how you learn. Thus, they never learn anything on their own.

[kibibu]

The idea that different people learn in different ways isn't one I just came up with. See the brief survey on Wikipedia here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Learning_styles

I find the idea that my preference for listening over reading textbooks implies I don't know how to read them is somewhat bemusing.

[nudetayne]

I doubt you could come up with anything since you can only learn from other people, apparently. "Learning styles" is just another way of pronouncing "lazy".