The Dystopian Hellscape Of Online Learning

American Conservative ^ | 1/20/2021 | Will Collins

[Onthebrink]

In Look to Windward, a science fiction novel from the late Scottish author Iain M. Banks, perfectly clear video and audio can be instantaneously transmitted across vast interstellar distances, yet people still vie to be physically present at a concert. This is something to consider the next time your local school board assures you that the classroom experience can be recreated on Zoom.

Last spring, the early stages of the Covid-19 pandemic forced schools across the country to adopt “online learning,” a euphemism for teachers yelling impotently at the disembodied heads of 20 students on a flickering video screen. The reasons for this were understandable. One sympathizes with educators and administrators forced to resort to untried digital platforms in the midst of an unprecedented public health crisis.

[kosciusko51]

Yeah, right. Online learning has been going on for 20 years.

The problem is universal online learning, since you still have the same students that make in-person teaching problematic, plus you have the teacher’s union to deal with.

[CharlesOConnell]

John Taylor Gatto, Champion NY Teacher, blew the whistle on the premises of universal compulsory education:

1. The children I teach are indifferent to the adult world. This defies the experience of thousands of years. A close study of what big people were up to was always the most exciting occupation of youth, but nobody wants to grow up these days and who can blame them? Toys are us.
2. The children I teach have almost no curiosity and what they do have is transitory; they cannot concentrate for very long, even on things they choose to do. Can you see a connection between the bells ringing again and again to change classes and this phenomenon of evanescent attention?
3. The children I teach have a poor sense of the future, of how tomorrow is inextricably linked to today. As I said before, they have a continuous present, the exact moment they are at is the boundary of their consciousness.
4. The children I teach are ahistorical, they have no sense of how past has predestined their own present, limiting their choices, shaping their values and lives.
5. The children I teach are cruel to each other, they lack compassion for misfortune, they laugh at weakness, and they have contempt for people whose need for help shows too plainly.
6. The children I teach are uneasy with intimacy or candor. My guess is that they are like many adopted people I've known in this respect - they cannot deal with genuine intimacy because of a lifelong habit of preserving a secret inner self inside a larger outer personality made up of artificial bits and pieces of behavior borrowed from television or acquired to manipulate teachers. Because they are not who they represent themselves to be the disguise wears thin in the presence of intimacy so intimate relationships have to be avoided.
7. The children I teach are materialistic, following the lead of schoolteachers who materialistically "grade" everything - and television mentors who offer everything in the world for free.
8. The children I teach are dependent, passive, and timid in the presence of new challenges. This is frequently masked by surface bravado, or by anger or aggressiveness but underneath is a vacuum without fortitude.

Why Schools Don't Educate

If we taught children to be self-reliant, self-actualized and to stand up to discover the world, Mr. Gatto proclaimed that vast swaths of the economy predicated on dependency and inculcated incompetence would collapse, therefore, the system will never change, only homeschool, under attack by Harvard Law--what do LAWYERS know about education--will ever improve the outcomes of children.

[chajin]

Yeah, right. Online learning has been going on for 20 years.

27. I taught my first online course via BBS (self-designed) in 1994.

The problem is universal online learning

Online learning is not for everyone. For that matter, the industrial assembly-line model of education that has been in place since the 1920s is also not for everyone, and would have gone the way of the dodo decades ago except for the fact that it creates jobs for people who are too intellectual for the private sector, and fits in perfectly with the Soviet indoctrination model of preparing young people for a life of comradeness.

[wintertime]

Yesterday, I dropped an On-Line course at our local community college. The teacher was a disorganized idiot and a computer illiterate. It was a mess.

My other two On-Line courses are doing better but both of these “professors” have their issues with the On-Line technology as well.

Sure, all three of the courses could have been great if they had been produced and delivered professionally and not run by idiots.

[wintertime]

On-line learning isn’t for all current teachers, either.

The teacher of the course I dropped yesterday at our local community college is a technology idiot.

[odawg]

“...since you still have the same students that make in-person teaching problematic...”

Surely all those budding rap artists will drop their swagger, shucking and jiving, and buckle down to study in front of their computer screens. Yes sirree.

[bgill]

Some teachers are idiots in front of a class or in front of a camera.

Obviously not for college credit but the past many months, I’ve been learning a ton from youtube. Easy enough to dump one host and find another who knows their stuff and presents it well.

[SMARTY]

The faculty cult of university ‘prima donna’s’ hates on-line course delivery.

Why?

Well...it undercuts their hard won status and it levels the field between them and organizations everywhere who have been at on-line instruction for a very long time.

[Mariner]

I’ve had the fairly unique experience of seeing online teaching first hand.

I’ve had a 5th grade teacher in my small home for 2 months and have been witness to a hard reality.

Kids perform online just as they did with full time classroom instruction. The smart kids excel and are bored with the slow pace.

The dumb kids don’t have a clue, never had a clue and are essentially unteachable.

Good kids pay attention and are polite. Bad kids disrupt.

People, there is no change in education. It’s just a different venue now.

[King_Corey]

I’ve taught online courses. It isn’t easy. Our lab team had issues keeping the lab machines online and working. Our students had degrees and advanced degrees and were more focused on their “jobs” instead of learning the new software. Most of the questions were answered in the material. Everyone was provided with ample time to read the documents ahead of time and none seemed to have done that. Even when we provided hard copy training manuals to lead them in the exercises, they didn’t use them well or take good notes. My time during labs and Q&A was taken up by computer issues or getting someone caught up.
These were classes that they were either forced to take because their company was switching to our software, or they were new and needed to learn the software. I had been a user of the software for over 8 years and worked for the software vendor for another 2 years before teaching the class. I knew how it all worked, the other instructors hadn’t even had to use the software in the real world, they just read the scripts and pretended they knew what they were doing.
Class cost was about 5k per week
In person classes were far more popular, I taught those a lot.

[billorites]

I'm teaching an online course right now. Much more time consuming for me than being in a classroom.

I regularly use online courses to maintain required professional education as a pilot.

Best online course I ever took was three months of online Spanish lessons via Skype with a teacher in Guatemala. I would use online language learning again in an instant.

[ConservativeInPA]

One sympathizes with educators and administrators forced to resort to untried digital platforms in the midst of an unprecedented public health crisis.

I do give a schiff about educators and administrators - 99% of them are leftists. I do however care about children receiving an education. My children completed high school via online learning, nearly 8 years ago. It worked for them. It's not going to work for every child. By the way, there was not a unprecedented public health crisis, especially with children. People need to stop repeating the biggest lie of American history because it has been used to "transform".

[wintertime]

Most of the issues with software could be corrected by doing one thing:

Grandmom test it! Step by step!

If an instructor’s grandma can follow the software instructions step by step and get everything working then the teaching materials are adequate.