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Grant Vickery
Mr. Grant Vickery
English 1102
24 April 2017
Teaching
History:
The kind of teaching I do is based on Greek rhetorical traditions. In Athens, around 500 BCE, the agora,
or market place, was where learning happened. Teachers, who were initially unpaid and taught out of
goodwill or a desire for reputation, would take on specific students as well as debate ideas in this public
forum. Of these teachers, the most famous were Socrates, his student Plato, and Plato’s student
Aristotle. They all were at odds, at some time or another, with the Sophists, people who taught for pay
and who were less selective with their students. The Sophists taught prescriptively, giving their students
different techniques (like rhyming), to persuade their audiences. Plato especially hated this style of
teaching, as he thought it cheapened learning (Plato xii).
This disagreement over who could learn has not been resolved in the following 2,500 years. The debate
rages on in academic journals and in the newspapers. Why Johnny Can’t Read and the follow-up, Why
Johnny Still Can’t Read, by Rudolf Flesch, shined a light on the academic establishments failure to deliver
on the most fundamental promise of education. Part of the reason that schools are failing to produce
students who can read is because of a loss of focus. While E.D. Hirsch is complaining about a lack of
cultural literacy, complaining that students don’t read enough Shakespeare, the NCTE is busy saying
Shakespeare is old-hat and that teaching it is probably racist and sexist. Educators cannot agree on what
they ought to be educating students about. The disagreement on methods is not new, but because we
have specialists rather than generalists, students are exposed to conflicting styles that are not
productive when mixed together. The compounding effect of education is lost because so much work is
done to undo anything previously established.
As teaching has becomes less effective, it has also become more expensive. College tuition rates have
risen at four times the rate of medical insurance, outpacing inflation at an egregious rate. For profit
colleges employ predatory lending practices, encouraging underprepared and unqualified students to
take out tens, sometimes hundreds of thousands of dollars in loans for an education that will look only
slightly better on a resume than a GED. Increasingly, people like Mike Rowe are calling for a return to
the trades, to skilled labor, but as of yet the promise of financial/class mobility through college remains
a strong enough lure to pull in record numbers of students every year.
Solutions:
Online learning vs. in-class learning is the Sophists vs. Plato of our day. Proponents of online learning see
it as a solution to rising costs, differences in access, and poor teaching. The best teachers, the best
material, all taught online through Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs). Detractors of this method
point out that you can’t develop a relationship online. A teacher cannot look at a students’ face online,
facilitate classroom discussion, or demonstrate personal care online. While the detractions might hold
true to a degree, they are also accusations that can be leveled at present teachers. When a teacher has
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200 students a semester and earns less than $35,000, how much “getting to know you” energy is really
left. I gave up on learning my students’ names years ago, only bothering to memorize a handful every
semester. I am not offering anything to most of my students that they couldn’t get online through
videos of me or, better yet, videos of those far more qualified than I.
If we only want a handful of students to be able to go to college, if we only want further education for
the elite or those fortunate enough to have dedicated parents or excellent primary and secondary
schools, then all we need do is keep our current model and wait for it the university bubble to bust. We
might fear university teachers being out of a job if the people who used to teach 200 students now
teach 20,000, but the widespread employment is coming anyway, better to cause it by replacing a bad
system with a good one rather than waiting for the same system to blow up in our faces.
Relying on MOOCs and accrediting online universities is a step in the right direction. Additionally, this
will create new market for jobs. With negligible overhead compared to a brick and mortar university, an
online university could afford to hire tutors to work with fewer students. These tutors could have
education and expertise in the area their students wanted to work. They could get to know their
students and work with them for a period of years, not months. They could oversee development,
challenge, and inspire these students. They could do all of this because they would be teachers, not just
clunky, expensive, underpaid performers who turn their years of hard work and study into its least
palatable form.
Dangers:
Critics of the online learning system, those I’ve spoken with at my university, often doubt its
effectiveness, believing in the financial security and proved success of the old model. I am sympathetic
to this critique. It’s frightening to change an old system, and while the money is still flowing it’s hard to
imagine shifting to something that might not produce the same amount of revenue and profit. There has
been a great deal of research on the effectiveness of online learning, though, and when done well, it
works as good or better than face-to-face learning (Allen). A more legitimate critique is that MOOCs
consolidate education into the hands of too few people. Knowledge would be controlled by those who
could produce the most interesting videos, the most easily understood material. This is not necessarily a
bad thing, but it can be dangerous if it leads to a silencing of dissenting voices or “neocolonialism” as
education becomes a cultural export (Albatch).
These critiques and the potential for abuse are frightening. Despite my enthusiasm for online learning,
that should not lead to discounting legitimate fears. That said, I believe the current abuses and failings
are so egregious that even if all these fears were to prove true, it would still be a positive shift.
Next Steps:
I plan on developing an online course. I do not have any way of delivering this course yet, and I won’t
get paid to do this, but if I believe it needs to be done, then I can go ahead and produce the content and
then seek an opportunity to get paid to deliver it. This is akin to producing a product and then finding
buyers, which is how anyone who makes or sells something does. For too long have educators tried to
insulate themselves from any risk, assuming that because they are educators, they deserve their paltry
paychecks and the respect of people around them. I disagree. They need to be exposed to risk just like
every other business. If they fail to deliver, they need to find a new job. But there can be no competition
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if students have low expectations because they are told they need something but not what that is. As
long as educators are selling a nameless product that is assumed to be important, they’ll never be good
at their jobs. We need clarity, purpose, and cost-effectiveness, and we need to use the internet as a tool
to deliver on our promises.
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Works Cited
Altbach, G Philip. “MOOCs as Neocolonialism: Who Controls Knowledge?” International Higher
Education 75: 5-7. Web. 12 November 2015.
Allen, I. Elaine, Jeff Seaman, and Consortium Sloan. "Online Nation: Five Years Of Growth In Online
Learning." Sloan Consortium (2007): ERIC. Web. 16 Nov. 2015.
Flesch, Rudolf Franz. Why Johnny still can't read: A New Look at the Scandal of our Schools.
Harpercollins, 1981.
Hirsch, E. D., Joseph F. Kett, and James Trefil. Cultural Literacy: What every American Needs to Know.
New York: Vintage Books, 1988. Print.
Plato. Gorgias. Trans. Donald J. Zeyl. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, 1987. Print.