In Brave New World, Aldous Huxley writes, “From eighteen hundred bottles eighteen hundred carefully labelled infants were simultaneously sucking down their pint of pasteurized external secretion.” Hyperbole, sure, but also a prediction of the major flaw of the 20th and 21st centuries: mass production.
Having the contents of the bottle synthesized for the nutritional needs of a growing infant is quite pragmatic. What, after all, is the difference between pasteurized external secretions and a mother’s milk? What about the infant who has no mother? Who is to feed her? Are we to let her starve?
These are precisely the questions which have arisen concerning the accessibility of higher education. One possible solution which has taken flight with recent and prestigious endorsements is online education. The argument, in short, is that since higher education remains a prize for the upper echelon, it must be deconstructed and presented in a new formula — similar to the artificial breast milk described by Huxley — for everyone’s relative benefit.
Online education has existed in many forms for many years. It serves many purposes, including providing adults with the opportunity to obtain degrees later in life, supplying overburdened parents with the possibility of gaining experience in a specific field and giving professionals a cheaper alternative to improving career skills.
All of these merits are well and good, and with ever-rising tuition rates, many gravitate towards the virtual classroom. I am not arguing against the values of this pedagogical domain, but rather drawing attention to the underground movement that seeks to broaden the scope of online education.
Reformers like Sal Kahn and Clay Shirky are leading the movement in what they believe will be the greatest education overhaul since the Progressive Era of the last century. Their goal is to reinvent higher education through the use of organized and widespread online education. With the exception of the Ivy League, and schools like Hopkins and the University of Chicago, they expect this method to replace the physical classroom. Their movement is attractive, polished, well funded by philanthropists and companies like Google, and it sounds cogent until you take a step back and allow the Kool Aid to metabolize.
Shirky recently published a post on his blog, writing:
“Outside the elite institutions, though, the other 75 percent of students—over 13 million of them—are enrolled in the four thousand institutions you haven’t heard of: Abraham Baldwin Agricultural College. Bridgerland Applied Technology College. The Laboratory Institute of Merchandising. When we talk about college education in the U.S., these institutions are usually left out of the conversation, but Clayton State educates as many undergraduates as Harvard. Saint Leo educates twice as many. City College of San Francisco enrolls as many as the entire Ivy League combined. These are where most students are, and their experience is what college education is mostly like.”
He argues that online education won’t detract from the “typical” college experience because the examples he listed above are the typical experience, not what we encounter at Hopkins or what he did at Harvard.
However, he concedes a point in his attempt to mock the elitist academic perspective: he has no plans to improve upon this experience, just to make it more widespread. He isn’t trying to mass produce Yale, he’s trying to counter arguments that question the quality of online education of this scale by saying, “Well, it’s not so good now, so how bad can it get?”
Huxley would have an answer for Shirky and his counterparts. In his book Ends and Means, he argues, “The early educational reformers believed that universal primary and if possible, secondary, education would free the world from its chains and make it ‘safe for democracy.’ It has not done so ... Good ends cannot be achieved by inappropriate means. The truth is infinitely obvious.”
To Huxley, we cannot achieve liberty through educational “bullying and passive obedience.” The means contradict the ends.
If, in the case of this new theory of education, the goal is, “A free world-class education,” as Sal Kahn puts it in The One World Schoolhouse, then how can our method be a compromise of standards for an efficiency of delivery?
Shirky insists that this romantic perception of college experience won’t be missed, but that does not eliminate the imperative to find a way to make sure it will be experienced. If the ideal is not available to everyone, the solution is not to get rid of it or to corrupt it, but rather to improve it and find a way to disseminate it.
To return to Brave New World, the Ford assembly line that Huxley feared would take over the world in the name of pragmatism and modernity is not a substitute for the mother’s milk that a select cohort of infants have the privilege of enjoying. We must find a way to ensure that education for all does not mean worse education for everyone. We ought to stand as protectors of old-fashioned learning and demand that it be improved, not reduced to the lowest common denominator.
