An Open Letter to Educators

If the message in this video resonates with you feel free to send it to any teachers, principals, professors, university presidents, boards of regents, boards of education, etc. you think should see it.

• Category

  Education

[uiruu]

You realize that "nerdfighteria" is a community started by someone else right? John and Hank Green (the vlogbrothers) came up with it. Dan just participates in the discussions. "Nerdfighters" aren't people who fight nerds. They are nerds who fight. Similar to freedomfighters. They dont fight freedom, after all, they fight FOR freedom. Being a nerdfighter means being interested in knowledge, current events, literacy, science fiction, fantasy... basically, it means being interested in the world.

[choosinganame123]

ad hommmmmmmmm

[VoiceOfJJP]

"Governments have taken tremendous steps toward transparency!"

Yea...no

[Dan Urrutia]

Would you like to be operated on by a surgeon who was educated by series of Google searches and creative inspiration?

[nifected]

"My schooling was interfering with my education."

Brilliant.

[neverforsakelife]

This is much more interesting now that I'm in university, although my experience is very different to what Dan described as his experience.

While lectures are quite similar to Dan's description, the class is split up into discussion groups called tutorials where we learn the material on a deeper level and how it relates to contemporary society (I study law and Society, essentially politics). It's not about facts, it's about understanding, and I think it's a decent foundation for law school.

[Sadako Tetsuwan]

Yeah, if you stick it out through the intro level courses in your first semester, then you start getting to more experiential studies, but you need to have a strong foundation in the basics first. I wouldn't want a surgeon who had just googled videos on how to perform a double bypass, and had watched every Khan Academy video on biology, and no hospital would want such a surgeon, either.

Facts are free, but facts aren't education. They're tools, and you have to learn how to use those tools.

[Sadako Tetsuwan]

His complaints about what he thinks universities are about demonstrate that he only stuck around for a semester. 'Oh, they only test you on FACTS!' Well, in an intro level course, that's true--in an intro level Japanese course, they drill you on how to read and write (even though all the characters are in dictionaries), and in an intro level calculus course, they teach you various equations and theorems, so that you have a foundation on which you can base further, more advanced studies.

Duh.

[Sadako Tetsuwan]

Google is great--if you know what questions to ask.

It's like Thunderf00t said--he could give a physics problem and a textbook to two people, one who had an undergrad degree in physics and one who had not, and the one with training could solve it in 15 minutes, while the one who had not probably couldn't solve it in fifteen months. You need education in order to apply the facts in a useful way.

[Sadako Tetsuwan]

Actually, he is. But no matter what school he had chosen, big research university or no, he would still have to take prerequisite classes. You've gotta walk before you can run. At a smaller, liberal arts college, he would have gotten more individual attention, his professors would have *learned his name* and all, and he might not have had these complaints. He chose his college poorly, and is now blaming the education system.

I see it clearly: he's a prissy, spoiled Millennial.

[ParadigmMMO]

omfg this is the tard that thunderfoot was talking about

I didn't think that his account wouldn't be banned yet