Is our Education Losing Valued Tradition?
Text: Leigh Kiniry
Photography: Renalda Ludvika and Caroline Hargreaves
It’s Sunday morning and you wake up to the sound of a newspaper thud on your door. The local paper boy has delivered your weekend edition and you’re excited by the thought of checking last weekend’s crossword results. You brew a pot of coffee, sit out on your porch, and browse through articles - local, national, and world - that strike you as appealing.
For the past 200 years, this was the traditional way of attaining news. Defined by local interests and culture, newspapers would deliver on a regular basis and be picked up by the consumer. In the latter half of the 20th century, innovation has interrupted the newspaper tradition:
You wake up, open your laptop and navigate to a web page that lists hundreds of major news institutions. You click, an action that has become as second nature as breathing. You navigate through a wealth of information on the world wide web. You are able to explore the opinions of liberals, conservatives, popular bloggers and average Joe’s. The information is endless.
If the charm that once was the smell of fresh print of a newspaper on Sunday morning has been lost to the appeal of the internet’s capabilities, what traditions will be lost next?
Anyone can log into iTunes and choose from over 100 academic institutions around the world, including Ivy League, Oxford, and Cambridge Universities. Lectures are posted, mostly for free, and can be viewed from any computer screen. Degrees from these institutions can cost over $150,000, and yet the information being paid for is accessible for free.
Not only are lectures available to be viewed online, certain universities (such as University of Pheonix, National American Unversity, DeVry University…) have developed wholly online courses which result in achievement of a degree from the university. We could potentially fulfill requirements for a degree without ever once stepping foot on a campus.
According to an extensive report by the US Department of Education on online education, research concluded that “…in recent applications, online learning has been modestly more effective, on average, than the traditional face-to-face instruction with which it has been compared” (Page 71, U.S.D.E.). Assumptions of the benefits of physically being in school are being broken down.
Facilities such as Blackboard and WebCT are forums in which students can speak with each other and teachers, exchanging information arguably more efficiently than in a classroom (A Virtual Revolution is Brewing for Colleges, Washington Post, Sept. 2009). Students can partake in lessons via their computers instead of being lectured in a hall with over 200 peers.
When will it stop making sense to send students away - paying for accommodation, tenured professors, and state of the art facilities - when a degree can be sought from one’s own home through arguably more interactive courses?
In recessionary times, it may not be long before the “experience” that is valued in college may not outweigh the $150,000+ price tag.
I see this trend as an honest representation of our generation and its projected future: efficiency outweighing experience, and a gradual corrosion of personal relationships. In economics we are taught to value the utility in things, which includes more than physical or monetary benefit. Should tradition have utility when measuring the cost of education? Perhaps not, but the development of personal relationships surely should.
It is the social experience at these institutions – the face to face exchanges with professors and peers - that must be considered. University is a unique chance to experience collective student ambition and learn from not just textbooks, but experiences of adult life. Unfortunately, this experience is becoming a privilege for the elite.
Just as with newspapers, the elite may survive for a while holding onto the expensive tradition of generations gone by. But the business model of the pricey university must change or the “experience” of education is lost to the internet revolution.
It is simply a catch 22. Without the traditions of attending a university, students will lose out on social benefits of face-to-face education. On the other hand, a degree attained online (which arguably should be equally respected to one attained offline) may be more affordable for the general population.
A question is posed to our generation here: how can we re-work the system and manage to benefit from modern educational tools whilst holding onto traditional educational exchanges – all at a manageable cost?
Will classic education be lost to internet education just as newspapers are being lost to internet sources? Is tradition really something to fight for, or is holding onto the past simply regressing?
It is only over time that answers to these questions may be revealed, but for now we must take notice of the education system transforming around us before we find ourselves receiving degrees in PDF files and depriving future generations of the joys of University life…
Leigh Kiniry is an Editor for the Magazine. She is American and studies International Relations at the University of St Andrews in Scotland.