Hollis Robbins: belief

Transcript context

…You now live in northern California. What would you say that people in Silicon Valley do not understand about teaching? That’s a real jump.[laughs] I’m going to have to sit and process that for a second. I’ve been a professor for a long time. I think about how to scale things up. I think about how to teach to thousands or tens of thousands rather than to the 20 people in the classroom. I’m not sure that it’s possible that the process of education, which is the process of learning information mediated by a trained, educated individual to students, which is the way teaching has been taught since Socrates’s time. Certainly, there are things that we do now differently than were done in Socrates’s time, but the delivery and cogitation and discussion and synthesis of ideas and learning has to happen, or I don’t see it scaling up. What do you think it is exactly that makes in-person, face-to-face teaching more effective than, say, teaching over Skype?…

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