Nobody reads

I’m just realizing something from school, especially my class mates:

They don’t share books/articles on the topics. They share youtube videos. Only time they share a document is practice questions.

My takeaway here being: people prefer to be taught. People want another human doing the talking (audible) and explanation.

Which explains why people get surprised whenever I respond “I read…” to how I learned to program. I’m going to guess, to some extent, they think I’m lying or making a joke.

I think this has some implications (from observation):

• People don’t develop their own reasoning and intuition.

• People don’t write (since they don’t read).

• And for people who graduate and want to be technical (say, with software dev), they end up in tutorial hell because this time, the problem they are interested in solving and the tutorials they watch don’t equip them with the REASONING.

• People’s creativity and imagination get washed off. Since you’re being taught, you don’t need any of them.

• [People don’t believe they can learn on their own.]

This is an epidemic!

From discussing about it in my Discord server, it seems:

• That’s what people have known all their lives — being taught. For approximately 16 years of their lives in school.

• Some believe it’s the easiest and fastest way to learn.

When you grow up knowing one thing, you don’t even think it’s wrong. You don’t even stop to question it. Speaking with many people, they exhibit traits of not believing in themselves or thinking they can come up with anything by themselves. They constantly need someone to guide them or verify/validate their work.

This is a quick write-up and I hope to write more on it another time. But I hope no one sees this as a trivial problem:

The less creative minds we have in this country 🇬🇭 the less likely we’ll have a beautiful country. We can’t have any new direction if no one is there to TEACH us — so we need people who can reason, imagine and create; a lot of them.