On this topic Fredrik deBoer, who is taking a break – perhaps a long one – from blogging, has a last, and informed, shot at the replacement of public education with private education:
Here’s the model that the constant “online education will replace physical colleges” types advance: education is about gaining knowledge; knowledge is stored in the heads of teachers; schooling is the transfer of that knowledge from the teacher’s head to the student’s head; physical facilities are expensive, but online equivalents are cheap; therefore someone will build an Amazon that cuts out the overhead of the physical campus and connects students to teachers in the online space or, alternatively, cuts teachers out altogether and just transfers the information straight into the brains of the student.
The basic failure here is the basic model of transfer of information, like teachers are merchants who sell discrete products known as knowledge or skills. In fact education is far more a matter of labor, of teachers working to push that information into the heads of students, or more accurately, to compel students to push it into their own heads. And this work is fundamentally social, and requires human accountability, particularly for those who lack prerequisite skills.
I’ve said this before: if education was really about access to information, then anyone with a library card could have skipped college well before the internet.
Or in other words, education is not a mechanical, deterministic process, but requires processes outside of those which can be implmented by a computer. Teachers must motivate kids who’d rather be outside – or at football practice. Study groups can be exceptionally beneficial – and if it’s not convenient to form them, they may not form. Fredrik has a final thought:
Education is always getting disrupted, in the Silicon Valley mind. And though they dress it up in a million different ways, this disruption always functions the same way: by minimizing the teacher, the actual human being, whose job it is to inspire and direct and cajole and, yes, to drag students into competence. Either the teachers are replaced by an iPad or they’re forced to scale up the number of students they can teach by factors of hundreds or thousands through online technologies. One way or the other, the teacher is the problem the technology is designed to solve.
There is another way, which is to actually put our money where our mouth is, recognize that education is expensive, and that teachers themselves have value, and that mankind has cultivated human relationships of respect and guidance between teacher and student for millennia for good reason. I know a thing or two about a thing or two, and people pay me for that knowledge. But despite a culture of the autodidact, I know almost all of it because of great teaching, because teachers with patience and dedication had the time and resources to guide me to understanding. Teachers are not a problem to be solved; teachers are skilled laborers who should be well-compensated and respected.
