Post
by Umgawa » 17 May 2007 14:26
Phife's right, particularly in the sense of a vocational field: Try learning to run a printing press from the internet, or even a manual. Wood shop, building trades, metal shop, home economics... these are all notoriously difficult to learn from the internet, because the internet can't tell you when or where you've screwed up.
I'd quit my job and find a way to work out of my house if driver's education didn't have teachers. Goddamn fifteen year-old maniacs driving down the road with nobody to work the emergency brake pedal by the shotgun seat... great idea.
The internet does a lousy job of elaborating on points and answering questions, such as when a senior in high school says to a teacher, "Jimi Hendrix was black?" Unfortunately, the internet has no way of telling someone, "You're too stupid to live," whereas a teacher with tenure can get away with it once or twice a year. Don't get me wrong, tenure's a system that's not without its flaws, but job security is one of the only things that makes people want to be teachers, because the pay is lousy, the hours are considerably longer than you think, you have to wait for the department head to die or retire before you get to teach the smart kids who don't need things repeated three times...
Next, to do away with teachers and to replace them with the internet begs the question, who grades the papers? The internet won't do it, and if you don't make students write papers, how will you gauge comprehension, absent a multiple-choice test, which is the worst kind of test for gauging much of anything. For example, if you want to really test how smart someone is, do you throw them on Jeopardy! or do you throw them on Hollywood Squares? Multiple choice tests are just a method for allowing the intellectual bourgeoisie to get by and feel good about themselves.
You want to know the real problem with education? It's the fact that people pass classes and move forward in school despite not being good enough. You hear about this a lot in urban areas, and it's hard to get a lock on why exactly it happens, but a lot of teachers give the kids passing grades so they don't have to go about the effort of holding the kid back in the same grade and taking the chance of having to teach that kid the following year. If the teachers aren't doing a particularly good job at anything, it's that they're letting too many stupid people move to the next grade, and then they get to high school and they end up dropping out because that's when multiple-choice tests become the norm, and all of the failing grades are telling them that they're stupid, so they drop out of school and become a hindrance on society in general, or they graduate high school and they're totally unprepared to join society.
The internet is not a cure for teacher apathy. I've known a lot of teachers who look at some kids and basically declare them failures (not out loud, of course), and try to work on the other students and make intelligent people out of them, because spending more time trying to engage the class failures and make the failures commit more effort to learning only takes away from time that would be better spent on the lesson plan.
The internet is not a cure for student apathy, either. Kids, and even college students, look at education as something they have to do, as opposed to something they want to do. Given the choice, I'm sure most kids would rather stay at home and play videogames or go out to the park and play basketball than go to school. Summer vacation is coming up, and I doubt I'll hear any kids saying, "Fuck, man, I wish school was still in session. Videogames are boring. I want to learn more stuff." I don't know anyone other than myself who just flips through Wikipedia for two hours a day, just for the hell of it; just to learn about random topics.
The internet is not a cure for parental apathy. As I said, the teachers have a lesson plan in place and they can't spend that much extra time trying to get kids to expend effort that they don't want to, so the link between teachers and parents is the last line of defense in getting kids a proper education. However, if the parents aren't willing to expend the effort to get their kid to shape up, then nothing's going to work. Parents often get this odd notion that, for the seven hours a day that a kid is at school, that kid is not their responsibility anymore, and that's just not true, and a lot of parents can't be brought to accept that fact. They think their kids are fine and that it's something wrong with the teacher.
So, really, I'm not that clear on what part of the internet makes a lot of what teachers do obsolete. It's a relatively unclear statement that necessitates elaboration beyond, "Try thinking about it," and I think that either you, your parents, or your teachers, or some combination of the three (which is the most likely case) contributed to your lack of happy memories of your educational experience. Furthermore, if you felt that you were getting a substandard educational experience at the college level, you could have always packed your bags and gone somewhere else, as there are lots of universities willing to take your money.
But I don't buy the "teachers do fuck all," excuse; not for a minute, and I don't think that you'll take the kind of effort to defend your point as I've defended mine. Again, that comes down to a question of effort, which is sorely lacking in a lot of people, and it's a lack of effort that eats away at education; it's just a question of whose.
