There is a shift occurring in the way our children are being educated today. Over the past several years, more and more online courses are being offered to high school and college students. In fact, there are school districts around the country who are working hard to make online courses a mandatory component of their high school curriculums.
Since their inception, online courses have seemed like an efficient tool in educating a greater number of students and the arguments for their increased use in middle school, high school and college sound worthwhile. Computers are part of our daily lives and students should learn to use them proficiently. The internet, as a tool for research and knowledge has become de rigueur. Administrators who support the growth of online classes add that they allow for wider educational opportunities to a greater number of students. For example, the Early English Literature class typically chosen by only a handful of students would likely be cancelled due to lack of interest. Now, that course can be offered online, providing those few students with educational enrichment they would otherwise not have been exposed to. Everyone seems ready to add online education to the remarkable list of benefits drawn from perhaps the greatest invention of modern times – the internet. Not so fast.
I suspect the real motivation behind this shift to online education is money. And that blade cuts in two directions - saving school boards and colleges money on teacher salaries and classroom space while still allowing them to collect ever higher taxes and tuition from us parents. Can you blame them? In this time of financial uncertainty and mounting deficits from statehouses to our houses, shouldn’t a cost effective way to educate our youth be celebrated? The answer depends on how you define “educate.”
In 1978 as a college sophomore studying marketing and management, readying myself for what I hoped would be a high paying and successful career in business, I had very little interest or use for literature. There was compulsory reading - the Wall Street Journal for school and the New York Daily news for Yankee scores. Beyond those, I couldn’t tell you if I had ever read a novel on my own outside of a high school classroom.
The next year everything changed. That’s the year I met Dr. John Daniels and through him, Herman Melville, Henry David Thoreau and Nathaniel Hawthorne. Dr. Daniels didn’t look like an English professor. No beard, no tweed coat with suede elbow patches. He had withering gray hair, a long face of the same color and a bulbous pink nose. His ever present pipe jutted out of his jaw silently accepting responsibility for the brownish yellow nuggets that passed for teeth. But when the old man read passages from Melville’s “Billy Budd”, he smiled an inviting smile and the wretched nuggets became invisible. All I could see on his face was the excitement of a kid on Christmas morning showing his dad how cool his new toy was and begging him to try it too. And I did try it and I loved it. The debates over language, the use of words, phrases and their meanings, not a single meaning but many, open to the reader’s interpretation, the development of rich characters and a story by a creative mind that can captivate a reader, the classroom was a thicket of ideas and Professor Daniels the machete creating light. I saw things I didn’t see before thanks to this ancient hardscrabble English professor. Dr. Daniels and his classroom forced me to ask myself questions about my future. I seriously considered a career change to professor of literature. In the end I didn’t change, but I was never the same.
Suddenly every class I attended seemed different. Marketing, advertising, philosophy, they all became a thrilling game I couldn’t wait to play in. Professors and students, new ideas and viewpoints, questions with no answers, many answers. The realization came that finding the answer isn’t always what education is about. The goal of education is the exposure to and engagement of ideas and questions that expand our minds, make us think differently and ultimately make us better and more curious human beings. A lucky few are disciplined and inquisitive enough to educate themselves through reading - Abraham Lincoln comes to mind. But for most of us, whether in high school or college, the classroom and its confluence of student, teacher and subject shouldn’t be minimized.
Asking our high school students to sit in front of already overused computers following a silent, static online curriculum, not to mention abstaining from the temptation to plagiarize from thousands of websites in an attempt to provide a quality education misses the most valuable element of education. It may save some money and allow a few students read Early English Literature on a brightly lit screen, but that’s no education.
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