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Is College Necessary in a Knowledge-Drenched World?
9/17/2008
A friend told me recently that people are asking him why learners, in this age, need to ever attend college to become educated. This question undoubtedly has occurred to all educators, and to many parents who are paying tuition. There is perhaps no more raw-edged question than this in all of higher education: Have we educators become obsolete?If we are considering only the learning value of higher education institutions, and not the developmental life-transition value, the list of unique opportunities for learning that higher education offers seems to have shrunk in the past few years.
One gold mine that distinguished higher education institutions in previous decades, the library and its collections, seems to have deflated in its traditional value. And, who needs large lecture halls to learn? Who needs a sound studio or post-production facilities when you can have them on your laptop? Who needs an art studio if you create your composition on your laptop? If high-end lab equipment or scientific simulation software is also available via the Web, why do you need to visit a campus to run an experiment? And why teach writing in a classroom where you have to talk when you could teach it on the Web where you have to, uh, write?
Maybe the question "Why attend college at all?" is suddenly a serious question.
I visited http://www.allexperts.com to see if those who opt not to attend college but are still serious about learning can at least ask questions and get an educator or expert to answer. In fact, yes, they can. Here's a sample question:
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I'm in my Schools Latin class, and my teacher is always so busy i can't ask him for help... So I was hoping you could tell me what is the difference, and what it is, and what they are about the cases. I just can't understand them.
As in-What are
Genitive (sing. and plu.)
Dative (sing. and plu.)
Accusative (sing. and plu.)
Hope you can help me out
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The answer from allexperts.com was accurate but was probably not helpful to the confused student since much of the terminology in the answer itself was domain-specific. The expert could not see the student nor her facial expression, could not anticipate the next question, and in short, had no way to know if he/she had helped or not.What the Latin student needed was a Q&A in context, the context of what she already knows, which is the scaffold a good teacher would use in an answer. She needed a teacher, or a tutor.
This is only one random example, but it demonstrates the issue for novice learners: By definition, they don't know how to learn by themselves without mediation. So, maybe the question "Why go to college?" is not such a good one. But we educators have set ourselves up for this very question. We ourselves in higher education have distorted people's perception of the process of learning. We have invited the question about why formal education is necessary by our own language and the misconceptions about learning we therefore perpetuate.
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