School is artificial

One of the hard parts of moving from school to “the real world” is adjusting to all the ways that school is artificial. It’s different from the real world.I’ve been thinking about this because of questions I see young learners commonly asking. Too often the questions are meaningless in the real world, and even if you could get answers, the answers would use useless.How long does it take to learn Python? In school, learning is divided into discrete labelled chunks. A class called “Beginning Python” might last four months. Everyone in the class will be taught the same things at the same pace. The objectives are laid out by the teacher, and at the end you will get a grade.Outside of school, learning happens as needed, at your own pace, guided by your own goals. Only you will know if you have learned enough, deeply enough, for what you want to do.An answer will be useless to you anyway: will you feel bad if it’s taking you longer than them? Maybe they started from a different point than…