I have to be careful now, as some of my kids used to be fans of MrBeast, but what he’s saying in this video, which I found in this tweet, is close to complete nonsense. I’ll ignore the learning styles claim he casually throws in. No, you are not a visual learner. That discussion is long settled. I’ll focus on the main point.

“Why are students today being taught the same way their parents were? Look at how much everything else has advanced. When I was in school the teacher would just stand there, read out of a book and write on a whiteboard”
“Now look at Mark Rober’s videos. You can learn complex topics in 20 minutes in a way that’s engaging, fun and you retain it. Just because our parents were taught one way doesn’t mean we need to keep teaching that same way. It makes no sense to me, I think education should be reformed dramatically”
“Students spend so much time in school. If we had real courses made through videos, made learning more hands on and optimised everything with modern technology, kids could probably learn more in 5 hours than they currently do in 8 hours”

The image is familiar. A teacher at the front. A book. A whiteboard. Passive students. Then cut to Mark Rober: fast, engaging, visually rich explanations where complex ideas seem to click in minutes. The conclusion feels obvious. School is outdated. Replace it with better content, better tech, better optimisation. It’s the kind of argument that sounds convincing if you’ve never had to actually teach something.

Except that this comparison collapses the moment you look at it more closely.

What Rober does is impressive. But he is not teaching novices from scratch in a structured, cumulative way over time. He is explaining, illustrating, and often simplifying. That is not a critique. It is a different task. A video can create insight, curiosity, even a feeling of understanding. But that is not the same as building knowledge that sticks, transfers, and can be used independently later on. How I wish it were, it would make everybody’s life much easier.

Learning is not the same as watching something that feels clear.

If anything, this is one of the most robust findings in cognitive science. What feels fluent is often misleading. Understanding in the moment is not the same as durable learning. That requires practice, retrieval, feedback, and time. The very things that look slow and inefficient from the outside.

And this is where the argument starts to fall apart.

“Why are we still teaching like our parents were taught?”

We aren’t. It’s a story people like to tell about schools. That doesn’t make it true.

At least not in the way this claim suggests. Classrooms today are already very different. There is more variation, more scaffolding, more formative assessment, and more attention to how students think and learn. The idea that nothing has changed is simply not true. It is a convenient narrative, not an accurate one.

But more importantly, the underlying assumption is flawed.

The assumption is that if something is more engaging, faster, and more optimised, it must lead to more learning. That if you compress instruction into slick videos and hands-on activities, you can get “more learning in 5 hours than in 8”.

That is not how learning works.

You cannot compress cognitive effort indefinitely. You cannot outsource thinking to a video. And no, you cannot skip the slow process of building schemas, making mistakes, practising, and revisiting. Efficiency in presentation is not the same as efficiency in learning.

If anything, over-optimising for speed and engagement often reduces learning. It removes the very friction that makes learning stick.

There is also something else going on here. A confusion between exposure and mastery.

Watching a great explanation gives you exposure. It can even give you the illusion of mastery. But mastery requires doing. It requires struggling a bit. It requires being wrong and correcting that. And foremost, it requires time. Not because schools are inefficient, but because the human brain is.

And then there is the role of the teacher.

In this story, the teacher becomes obsolete. Replaced by “better content”. But teaching is not just delivering content. It is diagnosing misconceptions, adjusting explanations, managing attention, creating a climate where learning can happen, and making hundreds of small decisions in real time. A video does not do that. It cannot. And no amount of production value will fix that.

Even the best video is static. A teacher is not.

This does not mean we should ignore technology. Or that videos like Rober’s have no place. They absolutely do. They can inspire, explain, and complement. But they are not a replacement for instruction. They are an addition to it.

And that distinction matters.

Because every few years, we see a new version of this argument. Replace teachers with television. With computers. With MOOCs. And nowadays with AI. And in this video with YouTube. Edison was already making similar claims a century ago, and he was smart enough to correct himself.

Each time, the promise is the same. Faster. Better. More efficient. And each time, the reality is more complicated. Not because education resists change, but because learning itself has constraints.

So yes, we should keep improving education. We should question practices, update curricula, and use better tools.

But we should also be careful with simple comparisons that feel right but are wrong.

School is not broken because it does not look like YouTube.

And learning is not something you can binge.

Image: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:MrBeast_2023_%28cropped%29.jpg