As someone who researches how education works... at this point the gap is still huge, even if it appears to have closed. The problem is people focus on the wrong parts of education and think that...
how can someone get as close to a quality education as formal schooling provides
As someone who researches how education works... at this point the gap is still huge, even if it appears to have closed. The problem is people focus on the wrong parts of education and think that simply providing the info counts as education. It does not. You cannot, and will not, get a quality education from self-directed study. Maybe in 50 years time, but not today.
At this stage, you can go away and read, watch, listen and probably even smell all the stuff you get from any education in a formal institution. What you are lacking (which is the foundation of education) is feedback, scaffolding, and personalisation. Because of this, you end up with no way of knowing if your sources are credible and quality (heard of fake news? Get ready for fake ed). This means you are incredibly likely to develop bad habits - self-taught programmers are notorious for this.
Beyond that, in so many fields in order to know 3, you can't learn 1 then learn 2 then learn 3. You have to learn B, then 1, then purple, then C, then 6, then 3, then 2. Self-driven study materials often don't account for that, and if you are the only one in charge of your learning you aren't going to know. You'll go out and learn 1, but have the wrong idea because you don't know about B (or even to go looking), then learn 2 but hate it because with the wrong idea about 1 and not knowing about purple, C and 6 you struggle for weeks and still learn it wrong (but you don't know you learned it wrong, because who could tell you?) then you go and try to learn 3, fail completely at best, learn it wrong at worst. Personalisation is related because sometimes people will implicitly see the connection between purple->C->6->3, and sometimes people will see purple->C->3 and need to be intervened with. Sometimes people will learn better to go purple->monkey->dishwasher->3 and arrive at the same place via a different route, because they have different strengths - self-driven study can't support that properly just yet (though people are trying).
Now you might then be thinking 'what the fuck is the point of all those resources then' - good question. One of the biggest things a good undergrad degree will teach you is how to handle your own learning, with your own quality and credibility assessments of material, your own frameworked understanding of your particular field, and a deep understanding of how you learn. This way you are set up to go out and do your own self learning (the term used in the literature at the moment is 'life long learning') in a way that is actually useful. But it is domain specific. This of course is where you get people who have come out of undergrad degrees who failed to reflect on what it is they were doing who say 'oh, my degree was completely useless, everything I needed to know I learned after I graduated' - bzzt - wrong. The only reason you were able to do that is because you were moulded as a learner over multiple years.
Do whatever you need to do to get yourself an undergrad degree in the field that interests you. It doesn't need to be Ivy, but you should look long and hard into the quality of the institution so you don't get scammed. If you look at stats analysis of social mobility: health, income, family life, etc etc etc. - getting an undergrad degree has the single greatest impact on your quality of life (on aggregate) than anything else you could possibly control.
I wanted to highlight this bit of your comment: I underline this two times with red ink as a long time self-learner. How I do things before and after my BA are very different, and I'm much faster...
I wanted to highlight this bit of your comment:
Now you might then be thinking 'what the fuck is the point of all those resources then' - good question. One of the biggest things a good undergrad degree will teach you is how to handle your own learning, with your own quality and credibility assessments of material, your own frameworked understanding of your particular field, and a deep understanding of how you learn. This way you are set up to go out and do your own self learning (the term used in the literature at the moment is 'life long learning') in a way that is actually useful.
I underline this two times with red ink as a long time self-learner. How I do things before and after my BA are very different, and I'm much faster and efficient now.
I would like to agree with you. After holding off for years I have decided to go back to school and applied for college to get a degree in computer programming so I could advance my career and...
I would like to agree with you. After holding off for years I have decided to go back to school and applied for college to get a degree in computer programming so I could advance my career and learn new techniques. I couldn't even begin to explain how much it made me change. All the stupid useless stuff I have heard professional programmers talk about suddenly made complete sense, and the blocks that prevented me from learning more advanced techniques quickly melted away.
That being said, I wouldn't dismiss the power of self-directed study. Even though my mind was being blown with how I could process the new information, I was still far ahead of my classmates, who weren't closely reading the books or trying to find other ways to process the new concepts.
In practice, our formal education systems have many failings. I think you would agree with me that the skills we need in order to self-learn need to be taught long before the undergraduate level. There are many other problems that I could list off depending on how finely you want to comb through the topic.
I never claimed formal education was perfect (and a good thing too, else I'd be out of a job) nor that self-learning has no place in education. What is crucial though is the order things occur in....
I never claimed formal education was perfect (and a good thing too, else I'd be out of a job) nor that self-learning has no place in education. What is crucial though is the order things occur in.
You've effectively said yourself that you've not been able to take best advantage of self-learning prior to doing a degree. While yes, you have an advantage over your peers right now, when they hit the same amount of time they will on average be further ahead than you are now. Degree then learning for X total time beats learning then degree for the same X total time.
I disagree that we need to teach self-learning before undergrad in its entirety, primarily because the nature of self-learning is domain dependent in many ways. If you go out and get an undergrad degree in physics, you have nowhere near the skills required to go out and self-learn in English Lit. You do have some skills (which is why cross-domain will often involve a grad cert or masters rather than a fresh undergrad degree, but not always depending on how much overlap actually exists) but primary and secondary schools are not the place to teach how to self-learn in all domains. Personally I'd prefer them to teach self-learning in things universally applicable like personal finances, politics/voting, media consumption, and rational life choices.
I would agree with you, but I would actually go further than that and say that you want to have somebody to actually explain computer science topics to you. Programming is something you have to...
I would agree with you, but I would actually go further than that and say that you want to have somebody to actually explain computer science topics to you. Programming is something you have to bend your brain around in order to understand properly. Either attend a class, hire a tutor, or join a study group. You need to know the fundamentals first, and you won't know if you really understand the fundamentals until you have someone to check it with.
Even then, it might not be enough. Read more about the language and how it is implemented; it can make a huge difference in the quality and performance of your code. That Scala book is actually a very good example of what I'm talking about - you just need to find an equivalent version for whatever language it is you are learning. For me, it was Peter Haggar's Practical Java.
When I am learning a new topic, I look for colleges that offer a course in the subject, search for syllabuses, then use koofers or rate my professor to decide which professor has a good...
When I am learning a new topic, I look for colleges that offer a course in the subject, search for syllabuses, then use koofers or rate my professor to decide which professor has a good curriculum.
I find using graduation requirements and seeing how universities structure their curriculum is a good way to get direction. Plus, getting academic reading important is really important to me to be on a similar grounding as people who received degrees in the area. I use Khan academy and moocs to fill in the gaps.
Have you heard of something called "reading"? I know it's an esoteric skill, but I've found it useful in developing my own personal education. I get things called "books" which contain "words"....
Have you heard of something called "reading"? I know it's an esoteric skill, but I've found it useful in developing my own personal education. I get things called "books" which contain "words". These "words" convey information. By reading the "words", I can transfer that information into my memory and learn. :P
Pick a subject you want to learn about. Find some books about that subject. Buy those books, or borrow them from your library. Read the books.
You can supplement this with reading online. For example, open a random article on Wikipedia. Any article. Read it. Follow any links that interest you. Keep reading.
If you're really motivated, contact a school or college or university and ask them to provide you with the required reading list for any subjects you want to study. Buy or borrow those textbooks and read them. Many textbooks come with practice tests. Do the tests to confirm your learning.
Was being so condescending really necessary? You have some good advice in your comment, but by leading off and ending with such dickish lines the odds of anyone actually reading any of it are...
Was being so condescending really necessary? You have some good advice in your comment, but by leading off and ending with such dickish lines the odds of anyone actually reading any of it are significantly lower. You catch more flies with honey than vinegar.
I included an emoji to indicate some light-heartedness. However, I'll admit that I couldn't escape the feeling that the answer to this question is just so bleedin' obvious that literally a...
Was being so condescending really necessary?
I included an emoji to indicate some light-heartedness. However, I'll admit that I couldn't escape the feeling that the answer to this question is just so bleedin' obvious that literally a 5-year-old could answer it.
by leading off and ending with such dickish lines
I didn't end with dickish lines. Everything after the first paragraph is sincere advice, with no sarcasm or snarkiness.
Are you college educated? Because depending on where you are from and received your education, you won't be exposed to the same teaching environment as a college educated person. This person could...
However, I'll admit that I couldn't escape the feeling that the answer to this question is just so bleedin' obvious that literally a 5-year-old could answer it.
Are you college educated? Because depending on where you are from and received your education, you won't be exposed to the same teaching environment as a college educated person.
This person could have been homeschooled by heavily religious parents and may not even know where to begin.
They could be from a foreign country and not have the same structured Western education system.
Shit, they could have had the exact same educational background as you but could be a recovering addict or been through some traumatic stuff and are legitimately paralyzed on what steps to take that their first response is to ask internet users on a site that exudes intelligence in their discussions because they seem nice and knowledgeable.
Are these things likely? No.
But are they impossible? No.
Not everyone on the internet has shared the same world that you grew into so things that are bleedin' obvious to you as a five year old is not obvious to others. So instead of making someone feel bad, just for asking a question that you know the answer, have some compassion. If you can't, let someone else answer the question and help. I don't appreciate that tone, its unwelcoming and its downright rude.
Yes, but only in one specific field (although we call it "university" here in Australia, rather than "college"). It was more like workplace training than an education. Anything else I know came...
Are you college educated?
Yes, but only in one specific field (although we call it "university" here in Australia, rather than "college"). It was more like workplace training than an education. Anything else I know came out of books originally and, later, also from reading articles and other sources on the internet (although I haven't stopped reading books to learn stuff). I never had to ask how to learn something: I just learned it by reading books I was interested in.
Yeah, it was unnecessarily condescending. Adding a :P to the end of a paragraph isn't magic pixie dust that makes it less so. Honestly...I think you're forgetting the principle of charity and...
Yeah, it was unnecessarily condescending. Adding a :P to the end of a paragraph isn't magic pixie dust that makes it less so.
Honestly...I think you're forgetting the principle of charity and assuming that OP is stupid, rather than ignorant.
"Go read a book" is obvious advice - if you've been around books all your life. There are plenty of 5 year olds, to borrow your example, whose parents don't read to them, who aren't encouraged to read on their own, and so on. And plenty of 15-20 year olds in similar situations, who have grown up thinking that books are boring things that teachers force you to read.
So to you, "just read a book" is obvious. It's not obvious to everyone. And further, going to the bookstore and picking out a book at random isn't the best way to do it - there are ways to tell good non-fiction books from fluffier, less educational ones. You suggested using reading lists from a college, which is a good suggestion. OP would probably benefit from more suggestions along those lines and less snark about how obvious you consider the answer to be.
But, that's literally how I live my life. The local thrift store near me has a surplus of donated books and they do a sale where you can fill a grocery bag with books (hard or soft cover, doesn't...
picking out a book at random isn't the best way to do it
But, that's literally how I live my life. The local thrift store near me has a surplus of donated books and they do a sale where you can fill a grocery bag with books (hard or soft cover, doesn't matter) for $1. I do it once a month and try to get stuff I have never heard of. Random books are often the best books.
When literature, yes. You can find very interesting books by pure coincidence (I bought my first novel of Saramago, one of my favourite authors, through complete coincidence), and I always like...
When literature, yes. You can find very interesting books by pure coincidence (I bought my first novel of Saramago, one of my favourite authors, through complete coincidence), and I always like going to bookstores and checking out the selves.
But when it comes to learning a certain area of study, it changes 180 degrees (cc @Algernon_Asimov here). Finding which books to read and which resources to use is a freakishly complex task that requires lots of work. I'm currently experiencing this as I move towards a new field for my upcoming studies, linguistics. The field is vast, the amount of resources is vast, the amount of competing recommendations and competing texts are vast. It's hard to decide your path among all that, and that's a skill, and a hard earned one.
I suppose I do agree with that. Buying a random book in a specific area of study is definitely not the same. But, if you are just looking to expand your education and knowledge base in general,...
when it comes to learning a certain area of study
I suppose I do agree with that. Buying a random book in a specific area of study is definitely not the same. But, if you are just looking to expand your education and knowledge base in general, buying random books (fiction or non) will teach you things you would not have normally pursued in the first place.
Certainly, but when you have to do thing in a certain time, that sort of thing can cost you too much. Also, randomly picking the wrong book can lead you to distraction, if not wrong/outdated...
Certainly, but when you have to do thing in a certain time, that sort of thing can cost you too much. Also, randomly picking the wrong book can lead you to distraction, if not wrong/outdated information. As a person who has actually done that (i.e. picking up random non-fiction for educational purposes), many times, I can say that that's not good when you're beginner, worse if an absolute n00b. But a rather knowledgeable reader can do that with confidence because they'd have the knowledge required to tell what's useful to them most of the time.
An example is, around 4-5 years ago, before starting my BA course, I was already interested in linguistics, mostly wiki-walking language families etc., the more "flashy" topics if I may say so. In the bookstores I picked a Renan book, 2 Wittgenstein books, then another one of Chomsky. Needless to say I was unable to read Wittgenstein ones and the Chomsky one, and that I learned rather late that Renan was completely outdated (reading the wiki page on him). Had I had better resources at hand, maybe I'd have gone for a linguistics BA rather than literature (I had the prerequisites at that time, it was just the decision and I decided for literature), and now I was already an MA student in the field. Instead, I'm home studying and hoping that I can show myself off to department administrators among other applicants w/ linguistics degrees. I don't regret reading literature, but I could've done that but couldn't because I (couldn't) read the wrong books.
Am I the only one that didn't read this as overly condescending? I took it far more lighthearted than most of you are. Chill guys, everyone's internal voice is different. Also, seriously. This is...
Am I the only one that didn't read this as overly condescending? I took it far more lighthearted than most of you are. Chill guys, everyone's internal voice is different.
Also, seriously. This is the only real answer here. As I get older I have found that the best way to continue personal education and betterment is to read as much as I possibly can. I read 3-6 books at a time and keep a healthy mixture of nonfiction and fiction.
There's an audio lecture series called The Great Courses that's really good. Better than non-fiction audiobooks in my experience, because it's recorded primarily to be listened to. Looking at...
There's an audio lecture series called The Great Courses that's really good. Better than non-fiction audiobooks in my experience, because it's recorded primarily to be listened to.
Looking at their website, they've expanded recently and have a lot of fluffier courses, which is unfortunate. The ones I've listened to have been very in-depth and college-course-like, and taught by actual professors. My favorites so far have been Big History, which does history of the entire universe, from the Big Bang to creation of the Earth and our Solar System, evolution of life and the rise of civilization; and Modern Physics for Non-Scientists which explains the concepts of quantum mechanics and relativity without getting into the hardcore math required.
The lectures are $$$, but you do get what you pay for in my experience. They're also available through various and sundry illegal means if you're into that sort of thing.
If I may be a cantankerous physicist for a moment: I have serious concerns with Big History, as does my wife as an historian, and most of our colleagues (with the exception of the one who teaches...
My favorites so far have been Big History, which does history of the entire universe, from the Big Bang to creation of the Earth and our Solar System, evolution of life and the rise of civilization; and Modern Physics for Non-Scientists which explains the concepts of quantum mechanics and relativity without getting into the hardcore math required.
If I may be a cantankerous physicist for a moment:
I have serious concerns with Big History, as does my wife as an historian, and most of our colleagues (with the exception of the one who teaches it). The concept usually places a professor in a position where they either need to quickly oversimplify material they usually don't understand well enough to teach in a useful way, or find enough guest lecturers to create a disjoint collection of disconnected abstracts.
As for quantum mechanics and relativity: hard physics is hard math. Take away the math, and you lose the physics too. I often worry that physics "for non-scientists" ends up being a well-meaning but quixotic endeavor, causing students' confidence to increase while their understanding has decreased.
In general, if you want to learn things well, I'd strongly advise against courses that don't actually try to teach them. @Algernon_Asimov has sage advice. If you want to learn about quantum mechanics, I'd suggest Sakurai. If you want to learn about relativity, I'd suggest the telephone book (Misner Thorne Wheeler). This, of course, leads to topics that are not popular science buzzwords: I'd suggest looking at Landau for a good introduction to classical mechanics. When you don't understand something, find books that explain the things you don't understand, and repeat this process recursively.
One resource I've found phenomenally helpful has been the Yale Open Course Catalogue. It is completely online and entirely free of charge! The lecture series are all on YT, I believe. To give you...
One resource I've found phenomenally helpful has been the Yale Open Course Catalogue. It is completely online and entirely free of charge!
The lecture series are all on YT, I believe. To give you an idea of what the courses entail, here's a snippet from their web-page:
Each course includes a full set of class lectures produced in high-quality video accompanied by such other course materials as syllabi, suggested readings, exams, and problem sets. The lectures are available as downloadable videos, and an audio-only version is also offered. In addition, searchable transcripts of each lecture are provided.
I've been using these programmes to fill in the 'gaps' in my education -- courses I don't think I'll ever get around to taking in university or subjects in which I'm only casually interested.
This is as close a substitute as I've found to actually taking the physical course. You get to 'sit-in' on classes in a virtual classroom setting, hear students ask questions, listen to the professor's lectures, and potentially even follow along with the syllabus.
I've really enjoyed the experience so far. Best of luck to you and hope you find it enlightening/enjoyable as well!
As someone who researches how education works... at this point the gap is still huge, even if it appears to have closed. The problem is people focus on the wrong parts of education and think that simply providing the info counts as education. It does not. You cannot, and will not, get a quality education from self-directed study. Maybe in 50 years time, but not today.
At this stage, you can go away and read, watch, listen and probably even smell all the stuff you get from any education in a formal institution. What you are lacking (which is the foundation of education) is feedback, scaffolding, and personalisation. Because of this, you end up with no way of knowing if your sources are credible and quality (heard of fake news? Get ready for fake ed). This means you are incredibly likely to develop bad habits - self-taught programmers are notorious for this.
Beyond that, in so many fields in order to know 3, you can't learn 1 then learn 2 then learn 3. You have to learn B, then 1, then purple, then C, then 6, then 3, then 2. Self-driven study materials often don't account for that, and if you are the only one in charge of your learning you aren't going to know. You'll go out and learn 1, but have the wrong idea because you don't know about B (or even to go looking), then learn 2 but hate it because with the wrong idea about 1 and not knowing about purple, C and 6 you struggle for weeks and still learn it wrong (but you don't know you learned it wrong, because who could tell you?) then you go and try to learn 3, fail completely at best, learn it wrong at worst. Personalisation is related because sometimes people will implicitly see the connection between purple->C->6->3, and sometimes people will see purple->C->3 and need to be intervened with. Sometimes people will learn better to go purple->monkey->dishwasher->3 and arrive at the same place via a different route, because they have different strengths - self-driven study can't support that properly just yet (though people are trying).
Now you might then be thinking 'what the fuck is the point of all those resources then' - good question. One of the biggest things a good undergrad degree will teach you is how to handle your own learning, with your own quality and credibility assessments of material, your own frameworked understanding of your particular field, and a deep understanding of how you learn. This way you are set up to go out and do your own self learning (the term used in the literature at the moment is 'life long learning') in a way that is actually useful. But it is domain specific. This of course is where you get people who have come out of undergrad degrees who failed to reflect on what it is they were doing who say 'oh, my degree was completely useless, everything I needed to know I learned after I graduated' - bzzt - wrong. The only reason you were able to do that is because you were moulded as a learner over multiple years.
Do whatever you need to do to get yourself an undergrad degree in the field that interests you. It doesn't need to be Ivy, but you should look long and hard into the quality of the institution so you don't get scammed. If you look at stats analysis of social mobility: health, income, family life, etc etc etc. - getting an undergrad degree has the single greatest impact on your quality of life (on aggregate) than anything else you could possibly control.
I wanted to highlight this bit of your comment:
I underline this two times with red ink as a long time self-learner. How I do things before and after my BA are very different, and I'm much faster and efficient now.
I would like to agree with you. After holding off for years I have decided to go back to school and applied for college to get a degree in computer programming so I could advance my career and learn new techniques. I couldn't even begin to explain how much it made me change. All the stupid useless stuff I have heard professional programmers talk about suddenly made complete sense, and the blocks that prevented me from learning more advanced techniques quickly melted away.
That being said, I wouldn't dismiss the power of self-directed study. Even though my mind was being blown with how I could process the new information, I was still far ahead of my classmates, who weren't closely reading the books or trying to find other ways to process the new concepts.
In practice, our formal education systems have many failings. I think you would agree with me that the skills we need in order to self-learn need to be taught long before the undergraduate level. There are many other problems that I could list off depending on how finely you want to comb through the topic.
I never claimed formal education was perfect (and a good thing too, else I'd be out of a job) nor that self-learning has no place in education. What is crucial though is the order things occur in.
You've effectively said yourself that you've not been able to take best advantage of self-learning prior to doing a degree. While yes, you have an advantage over your peers right now, when they hit the same amount of time they will on average be further ahead than you are now. Degree then learning for X total time beats learning then degree for the same X total time.
I disagree that we need to teach self-learning before undergrad in its entirety, primarily because the nature of self-learning is domain dependent in many ways. If you go out and get an undergrad degree in physics, you have nowhere near the skills required to go out and self-learn in English Lit. You do have some skills (which is why cross-domain will often involve a grad cert or masters rather than a fresh undergrad degree, but not always depending on how much overlap actually exists) but primary and secondary schools are not the place to teach how to self-learn in all domains. Personally I'd prefer them to teach self-learning in things universally applicable like personal finances, politics/voting, media consumption, and rational life choices.
I would agree with you, but I would actually go further than that and say that you want to have somebody to actually explain computer science topics to you. Programming is something you have to bend your brain around in order to understand properly. Either attend a class, hire a tutor, or join a study group. You need to know the fundamentals first, and you won't know if you really understand the fundamentals until you have someone to check it with.
Even then, it might not be enough. Read more about the language and how it is implemented; it can make a huge difference in the quality and performance of your code. That Scala book is actually a very good example of what I'm talking about - you just need to find an equivalent version for whatever language it is you are learning. For me, it was Peter Haggar's Practical Java.
When I am learning a new topic, I look for colleges that offer a course in the subject, search for syllabuses, then use koofers or rate my professor to decide which professor has a good curriculum.
I find using graduation requirements and seeing how universities structure their curriculum is a good way to get direction. Plus, getting academic reading important is really important to me to be on a similar grounding as people who received degrees in the area. I use Khan academy and moocs to fill in the gaps.
Specific mooc sites I use:
Have you heard of something called "reading"? I know it's an esoteric skill, but I've found it useful in developing my own personal education. I get things called "books" which contain "words". These "words" convey information. By reading the "words", I can transfer that information into my memory and learn. :P
Pick a subject you want to learn about. Find some books about that subject. Buy those books, or borrow them from your library. Read the books.
You can supplement this with reading online. For example, open a random article on Wikipedia. Any article. Read it. Follow any links that interest you. Keep reading.
If you're really motivated, contact a school or college or university and ask them to provide you with the required reading list for any subjects you want to study. Buy or borrow those textbooks and read them. Many textbooks come with practice tests. Do the tests to confirm your learning.
Read!
Was being so condescending really necessary? You have some good advice in your comment, but by leading off and ending with such dickish lines the odds of anyone actually reading any of it are significantly lower. You catch more flies with honey than vinegar.
I included an emoji to indicate some light-heartedness. However, I'll admit that I couldn't escape the feeling that the answer to this question is just so bleedin' obvious that literally a 5-year-old could answer it.
I didn't end with dickish lines. Everything after the first paragraph is sincere advice, with no sarcasm or snarkiness.
Are you college educated? Because depending on where you are from and received your education, you won't be exposed to the same teaching environment as a college educated person.
This person could have been homeschooled by heavily religious parents and may not even know where to begin.
They could be from a foreign country and not have the same structured Western education system.
Shit, they could have had the exact same educational background as you but could be a recovering addict or been through some traumatic stuff and are legitimately paralyzed on what steps to take that their first response is to ask internet users on a site that exudes intelligence in their discussions because they seem nice and knowledgeable.
Are these things likely? No.
But are they impossible? No.
Not everyone on the internet has shared the same world that you grew into so things that are bleedin' obvious to you as a five year old is not obvious to others. So instead of making someone feel bad, just for asking a question that you know the answer, have some compassion. If you can't, let someone else answer the question and help. I don't appreciate that tone, its unwelcoming and its downright rude.
Yes, but only in one specific field (although we call it "university" here in Australia, rather than "college"). It was more like workplace training than an education. Anything else I know came out of books originally and, later, also from reading articles and other sources on the internet (although I haven't stopped reading books to learn stuff). I never had to ask how to learn something: I just learned it by reading books I was interested in.
I refer you to @vakieh's toplevel comment here.
Yeah, it was unnecessarily condescending. Adding a
:Pto the end of a paragraph isn't magic pixie dust that makes it less so.Honestly...I think you're forgetting the principle of charity and assuming that OP is stupid, rather than ignorant.
"Go read a book" is obvious advice - if you've been around books all your life. There are plenty of 5 year olds, to borrow your example, whose parents don't read to them, who aren't encouraged to read on their own, and so on. And plenty of 15-20 year olds in similar situations, who have grown up thinking that books are boring things that teachers force you to read.
So to you, "just read a book" is obvious. It's not obvious to everyone. And further, going to the bookstore and picking out a book at random isn't the best way to do it - there are ways to tell good non-fiction books from fluffier, less educational ones. You suggested using reading lists from a college, which is a good suggestion. OP would probably benefit from more suggestions along those lines and less snark about how obvious you consider the answer to be.
But, that's literally how I live my life. The local thrift store near me has a surplus of donated books and they do a sale where you can fill a grocery bag with books (hard or soft cover, doesn't matter) for $1. I do it once a month and try to get stuff I have never heard of. Random books are often the best books.
When literature, yes. You can find very interesting books by pure coincidence (I bought my first novel of Saramago, one of my favourite authors, through complete coincidence), and I always like going to bookstores and checking out the selves.
But when it comes to learning a certain area of study, it changes 180 degrees (cc @Algernon_Asimov here). Finding which books to read and which resources to use is a freakishly complex task that requires lots of work. I'm currently experiencing this as I move towards a new field for my upcoming studies, linguistics. The field is vast, the amount of resources is vast, the amount of competing recommendations and competing texts are vast. It's hard to decide your path among all that, and that's a skill, and a hard earned one.
I suppose I do agree with that. Buying a random book in a specific area of study is definitely not the same. But, if you are just looking to expand your education and knowledge base in general, buying random books (fiction or non) will teach you things you would not have normally pursued in the first place.
Certainly, but when you have to do thing in a certain time, that sort of thing can cost you too much. Also, randomly picking the wrong book can lead you to distraction, if not wrong/outdated information. As a person who has actually done that (i.e. picking up random non-fiction for educational purposes), many times, I can say that that's not good when you're beginner, worse if an absolute n00b. But a rather knowledgeable reader can do that with confidence because they'd have the knowledge required to tell what's useful to them most of the time.
An example is, around 4-5 years ago, before starting my BA course, I was already interested in linguistics, mostly wiki-walking language families etc., the more "flashy" topics if I may say so. In the bookstores I picked a Renan book, 2 Wittgenstein books, then another one of Chomsky. Needless to say I was unable to read Wittgenstein ones and the Chomsky one, and that I learned rather late that Renan was completely outdated (reading the wiki page on him). Had I had better resources at hand, maybe I'd have gone for a linguistics BA rather than literature (I had the prerequisites at that time, it was just the decision and I decided for literature), and now I was already an MA student in the field. Instead, I'm home studying and hoping that I can show myself off to department administrators among other applicants w/ linguistics degrees. I don't regret reading literature, but I could've done that but couldn't because I (couldn't) read the wrong books.
Sarcasm is a bit hard to decipher on the internet, but it did kind of seem a bit stuck-up. Other than that, it is good advice.
Am I the only one that didn't read this as overly condescending? I took it far more lighthearted than most of you are. Chill guys, everyone's internal voice is different.
Also, seriously. This is the only real answer here. As I get older I have found that the best way to continue personal education and betterment is to read as much as I possibly can. I read 3-6 books at a time and keep a healthy mixture of nonfiction and fiction.
Read books, get education. =)
the availability of public info is almost totally depends on what you're trying to learn unfortunately. where do you want to get started?
There's an audio lecture series called The Great Courses that's really good. Better than non-fiction audiobooks in my experience, because it's recorded primarily to be listened to.
Looking at their website, they've expanded recently and have a lot of fluffier courses, which is unfortunate. The ones I've listened to have been very in-depth and college-course-like, and taught by actual professors. My favorites so far have been Big History, which does history of the entire universe, from the Big Bang to creation of the Earth and our Solar System, evolution of life and the rise of civilization; and Modern Physics for Non-Scientists which explains the concepts of quantum mechanics and relativity without getting into the hardcore math required.
The lectures are $$$, but you do get what you pay for in my experience. They're also available through various and sundry illegal means if you're into that sort of thing.
If I may be a cantankerous physicist for a moment:
I have serious concerns with Big History, as does my wife as an historian, and most of our colleagues (with the exception of the one who teaches it). The concept usually places a professor in a position where they either need to quickly oversimplify material they usually don't understand well enough to teach in a useful way, or find enough guest lecturers to create a disjoint collection of disconnected abstracts.
As for quantum mechanics and relativity: hard physics is hard math. Take away the math, and you lose the physics too. I often worry that physics "for non-scientists" ends up being a well-meaning but quixotic endeavor, causing students' confidence to increase while their understanding has decreased.
In general, if you want to learn things well, I'd strongly advise against courses that don't actually try to teach them. @Algernon_Asimov has sage advice. If you want to learn about quantum mechanics, I'd suggest Sakurai. If you want to learn about relativity, I'd suggest the telephone book (Misner Thorne Wheeler). This, of course, leads to topics that are not popular science buzzwords: I'd suggest looking at Landau for a good introduction to classical mechanics. When you don't understand something, find books that explain the things you don't understand, and repeat this process recursively.
One resource I've found phenomenally helpful has been the Yale Open Course Catalogue. It is completely online and entirely free of charge!
The lecture series are all on YT, I believe. To give you an idea of what the courses entail, here's a snippet from their web-page:
I've been using these programmes to fill in the 'gaps' in my education -- courses I don't think I'll ever get around to taking in university or subjects in which I'm only casually interested.
This is as close a substitute as I've found to actually taking the physical course. You get to 'sit-in' on classes in a virtual classroom setting, hear students ask questions, listen to the professor's lectures, and potentially even follow along with the syllabus.
I've really enjoyed the experience so far. Best of luck to you and hope you find it enlightening/enjoyable as well!
Edit: forgot to include a link to the Yale youtube page.