Virtual college would deprive future students

Published in the Sept. 16 issue of the Daily Beacon, and found online here.

Just last week, I finally acquired the long-sought reasoning to justify my pursuit of a career in humanities education.

“Poetry lifts the veil from the hidden beauty of the world ... The great secret of morals is Love; or a going out of our own nature, and an identification of ourselves with the beautiful which exists in thought, action or person, not our own,” Percy Bysshe Shelley wrote in his “Defence of Poetry.” Through the imaginative exercise of reading poetry, or literature more generally, one may learn to empathize with others, to imagine another’s condition.

In other words, literature professors are responsible for the “moral education of humankind,” my professor exclaimed. What greater good might I aspire to than this?

At last, justification for my eternal studenthood.

Ah, but this euphoria and (seemingly) finally attained purpose for my career aspirations did not last long.

That very night, I came across a Sept. 8 article titled “The Web will dismember universities, just like newspapers,” written by Zephyr Teachout on http://www.thebigmoney.com, a member of the Slate (magazine) Group. The article predicts the demise of the traditional college experience due to the economic unsustainability of the education business and the cheapness of online classes in comparison to traditional ones.

I’m obviously holding onto my newspapers by the teeth, and I will hold onto my traditional education system just as ardently.

The article claims that the fields of education and journalism have survived because they have traditionally provided a commodity: hard-to-come-by information. With the advent of the Information Age and with obscure information readily available on the Internet, the article claims that universities are no longer the sole source of such information.

At the most basic level, I disagree that the college experience consists of a simple accumulation of facts. Education is about much more than simple memorization. The college experience ignites a period of self-discovery and self-definition, based upon interactions with peers and new ideas.

A Web-based college experience will not be a college experience at all. It would further the social disconnection and virtual “relationships” propogated by social networking Web sites. It would also destroy curiosity and creativity, instead demanding memorization of facts and figures and thus denying free thinking and exposure to conflicting viewpoints.

This prediction scares me on multiple levels, my most obvious and palpable concern being the availability of employment opportunities for myself, an aspiring academic. But more deeply, I am concerned for the intellectual development of future generations whose only college education might be virtual. Such a transition will mark the devolution of intellectuality. It’s already uncool to read books — what will this mean for future generations? Will their minds be completely filled with bits of facts, disconnected from any coherent semblance of general knowledge?

Will this next generation be even more self-deluded than our own, with their only postulations being Twitter-esque declarations about themselves? How will they define themselves as human beings, if they don’t have an opportunity to distance themselves from their upbringings and to define their ideologies independently if they are not allowed the opportunity to contextualize their existences within a larger universe of ideas and social connections?

Maybe I’m being idealistic about the yields of the traditional education system, but I certainly wouldn’t want my potential children, or anyone in the next generation for that matter, to be denied the college experience I have had.