A number of replies here, and elsewhere generally, are along the lines of "bootcamps aren't worth it bc the material is all available for free online." I think this fundamentally misunderstands what coding bootcamps (and all schools) offer and what students get out of them 🧵👇🏽

I'm a Senior Instructor at @junocollege, known for our 12 week bootcamps and our exceptionally handsome Senior Instructors. It's absolutely true that everything we teach is available totally free online, all over the place! The thing is, that's true for most (all?) trades.

The appeal of trade schools is rarely that they offer arcane knowledge to which only they have access. That's never really how educational institutions work. (I say 'rarely' bc of course the exception here is Dave's School of Passwords. "Dave's! Just call ***-***-****!")

The purpose of a school isn't to share secrets; it's to help people engage with knowledge. The most significant things that good schools offer are safe, structured, supportive spaces in which to learn, and the opportunity to build a community.

This is why it doesn't matter that the content is freely available online. Good education isn't about walking through the material, it's about bringing the material into a space where people feel like they can trust themselves enough to engage with it.

See, the freely available thing we sell isn't code, it's the stuff people bring in the door with them; a good school teaches people to access that stuff. Education is about empowerment. The material itself is almost filler (but I need this job so please no one tell @heatherpayne)

If content was all that mattered, the smartest people would be the best teachers. I took undergrad physics, and let me tell you, that isn't how it goes. My profs were brilliant minds, but one once literally yelled "HOW DO YOU NOT GET IT??" at me about a quantum mechanics problem.

An *unsolved* quantum mechanics problem.

Have you heard the quote, "a bad school teaches facts, a good school teaches people"? Yeah, me either, but it seems like the kind of thing someone fancy has probably said. Anyways, you get me - good instructors don't give people content, they give them a relationship to content.

Speaking of relationships (whoa, a segue? On Twitter??), I said that the other big thing bootcamps give students is the opportunity to build a community, and I'm not talking about networking; yeah, there's that too, but I mean social, scholastic and professional community.

It's hard to overstate how important this part is. Entering, succeeding or moving up in any field is incredibly difficult without a community of peers to help you emotionally, socially and culturally. It can be scary and lonely out there.

This is exceptionally true in the gatekeep-y world of tech. People will ask how you don't know Redux in the same voice that the other boys in my grade school used to ask why I tucked in my t-shirts. That's why you need community. Your friends think you dress awesome.

Building social groups is even more important when we think about members of communities that are underrepresented in tech. Just like my old schoolyard, tech is full of shitty little boys who enforce traditionally dominant and oppressive power structures.

For members of marginalized groups to succeed in tech, they need opportunities to find and build communities of support. For tech to become more equitable and inclusive, people of privilege and power need opportunities to be part of those communities, to learn to be good allies.

Those opportunities don't come from reading JavaScript tutorial blogs. They come from going to class together.

[CODA] Those are the biggest parts of what schools offer, but I'll also add another, lesser-but-still-important piece, which is content curation. Sure, the material we teach can all be found online free, but have you ever been on the internet? That place is, like, 95% terrible.

For every good blog post, there are 1000 outdated / bad practice Stack Overflow replies. If you're the one asking, how do you tell which is which? What order of learning is best for building understandings? What is fundamental and what is extraneous?