Let’s get this straight: online education will never completely replace in-person instruction or totally eclipse the most fundamental tenets of the traditional university. At least, it shouldn’t.
Nevertheless, California State Senate President Pro Tem Darrell Steinberg, D-Sacramento, introduced a bill in late February that would require the 50 most impacted lower division courses in the California higher education system to be offered online. The bill follows Gov. Jerry Brown’s public advocacy for online education to the UC Board of Regents and also at San Jose State University in January.
But rest assured: This is no educational apocalypse.
Although Steinberg’s bill was criticized by the UC Academic Senate for its foolish outsourcing of education to for-profit third parties, it’s heartening that at least one California legislator is finally beginning to catch on to the most important question in higher education today. As New York Times columnist David Brooks wrote earlier this month, “The best part of the rise of online education is that it forces us to ask: What is a university for?”
If online education is just as capable of communicating at least technical and procedural information (former Stanford professor Sebastian Thrun’s online STEM courses at Udacity can attest to this) — then what, exactly, is the purpose of a university?
Brooks, a notable champion of online education over the years, answered that question for his readers two weeks ago — online education can teach technical knowledge; while “practical” knowledge, the richer and more elusive lessons we learn in college, should be left for traditional universities. That’s a start, but I suspect the actual answer is more far-reaching — and it might leave UC students uneasy.
Ever since the 1944 GI Bill enabled thousands of young Americans to attend college, higher education has proliferated throughout American society and evolved from privilege to workforce prerequisite. Embracing the shift in their clientele and inspired to create a more educated American workforce, colleges and universities across the country drifted from their roots in classical education in favor of the pragmatic knowledge that was and continues to be in high demand. Largely abandoning their position as lofty country clubs for the upper crust of American society, universities nationwide embraced a new role as the engines of the American economy.
Offering vocation-centered, concrete education to a mass audience is admirable — both dreamers and pragmatists are vital to American society. Universities tried to find a middle ground, attempting to instill a sense of purpose and meaning in the lives of students and provide them with the pragmatic knowledge necessary for success in the American economy. Today, when online universities offer technical training at a fraction of the price of a traditional college, it’s clear the dual-purpose model needs rethinking.
I’ve argued for classical education in the past, but I know “Walden” and “Julius Caesar,” as much as I love them, aren’t for everyone. My father was an adjunct professor at a California community college in the Sacramento area a few years ago. He met a student one day who’d been attending a two-year institution for 10 semesters. That’s three years longer than the expected time to earn an associate degree — and he was still a freshman.
Beyond the technical learning, job training and lower-level workforce experience — the vocational schooling — necessary for 21st-century competitiveness, most Americans don’t need or desire the watered-down classical education most universities force down the throats of disgruntled students. Not everyone is meant to go to college, and not everyone should have to. College is about pushing the limits of our feeble understanding to reach unforeseen conclusions and immersion in a culture of constant intellectual challenge to reach into the depths of the elusive truth. College is a sort of education that can’t be forced.
Online education, on the other hand, has the potential fill the gap in American vocational schooling that traditional universities have failed to address. Like the “pragmatization” of American universities in the 1950s, the Internet is the next medium that will expand education to a wider audience worldwide. The Internet can be a forum for the democratization of technical education — a place where all Americans, for the first time in history, can learn the skills necessary to compete in the 21st-century global economy rather than hanging on in community college for five years or more.
For students like the young man my father taught, for American industrial workers left without jobs after production-line outsourcing, for anyone left behind in the relentless race of the modern economy — online education just might hold the promise of the future.
Contact Connor Grubaugh at [email protected] or follow him on Twitter: @connorgrubaugh.