Teaching, skills and learning

Mostly the everyday ones that never appear on a timetable. Children pick up cooking, handling money, bargaining at the market and basic manners, like how to greet an older relative, by watching their parents do it hundreds of times. In the countryside you could add riding a bicycle and looking after animals. School is good at knowledge, but these habits are absorbed rather than taught. Between a teacher and teaching yourself, I'd choose a teacher for the beginning and independence afterwards. A beginner doesn't know what they're doing wrong, so a self-taught swimmer can practise a bad stroke for months and only make it more permanent. One sharp-eyed coach fixes that in a single session. Even so, I admire self-taught people, because working things out alone builds a kind of persistence that lessons can't give you, and for skills such as video editing there are excellent free tutorials. The ideal is probably to get the foundations from someone, then explore on your own. Technology is already reshaping all this, and I think the change will go further. Apps can now listen to your pronunciation or watch your golf swing and give feedback instantly, at any hour, without losing patience. That will make decent instruction available to people who could never afford a tutor. What I doubt it can supply is the push. A human teacher notices when you're discouraged and says the right thing, and I suspect that will remain the hard part to automate.