Self-Taught

What is it with teaching? What is it really to teach? Can not everything that the teacher says be written down and handed to someone enabling people not in the classroom to learn the material in the same time-frame? Or with the modern age, use video? Reading books on a topic makes one self-taught, but can someone who learned from a video say the same thing?

There seems to be something special about being self-taught. Newton was mostly self-taught, and that makes it more impressive. When someone says they taught themselves to play piano, some people seem to think that is more impressive than taking classes and learning. Self-taught is harder, but why? All of the information that the teacher is giving out is available in a book - they are not making it up on the spot.

I believe it is a translation problem. Every person has their own internal language. A teacher is someone who has learned a subject very well and can translate it into the students' languages. The teacher had to learn the subject matter and put it into his own language first. There are a lot of people who know things but can not teach, and I think this explains it. They are not good at translating their thoughts into the words of the students. It also makes sense to have smaller classrooms, because this allows the teacher to focus translating to a smaller group of individuals' languages.

Teaching oneself something requires that they be the translator as well as the student, but if they do not know the material to begin with, translation errors will occur. So, as much as fun teaching oneself something from other people words is, the coverage can not be the same as with a good teacher. Then again, the student who is self-taught is not bound by the limits of the teacher's knowledge. So, there are trade-offs.

-Edward